TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/88/88capcam.8

Text File | 1990-12-01 | 10KB | 186 lines

                çüàå                                                    ê««The Made-for-TV Campaign

November 14, 1988

A year when candidates--not reporters--controlled the images

BY LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN

For weeks the frenzied activity at Bush for President headquarters in
Washington and Dukakis for President headquarters in Boston has come
to an abrupt halt every evening at precisely 6:30.  Like religious
devotees called to prayers, staffers have huddled in small groups
around glowing screens for the one hour of the day when their
champions go head to head in the campaign's most critical arena:
TV's evening news.

If 1960 was the year that television became a decisive factor in a
national campaign, 1988 is the year that television was the campaign,
a year in which one party, at its convention, deliberately muted the
colors of the flag so they would televise better.  To ensure that the
news media would deliver the desired image, both campaigns shielded
their men from spontaneous contact with the press, arranging instead
a series of colorful, staged-for-TV events.  On most days the
strategy worked.  "TV producers are like nymphomaniacs when it comes
to visuals," explains Albert Hunt, Washington bureau chief of the
Wall Street Journal.  "Television's insatiable need for pretty
pictures has cheapened the campaign.

As this year's campaign draws to a close, many reporters and news
executives find themselves in agreement.  "Television news has been
co-opted by the image-makers and the media managers," says former
network correspondent Marvin Kalb, director of Harvard's Shorenstein
Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.  "The
manipulators learned that by controlling the pictures you end up
controlling the content."

Nonetheless, broadcast journalism has a lot to be proud of in 1988.
Such programs as the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, CNN's Inside Politics
'88 and ABC's Nightline regularly provided distinguished coverage.
In addition, as the campaign wore on, the networks endeavored to
bring greater depth to the nightly news, focusing on issues and
exposing some of the candidates' distortions.  "Television reporters
didn't trivialize the campaign," says Andrew Stern, a professor at
Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.  "The candidates did."

Stern may be right, but the larger truth is that the candidates
trivialized their campaigns in order to meet the demands of
commercial TV news.  The past had taught them that although a
candidate might deliver a thoughtful speech, if he tripped and fell
as he left the stage, that was all anyone would see on the news.  TV
covers only three things, says Bush's media guru, Roger Ailes,
"visuals, attacks and mistakes."  Broadcast news, agrees Michael
Deaver, Ronald Reagan's former imagemaker, is "primarily concerned
with entertainment values."

Deaver helped Reagan exploit the media more effectively than any
other U.S. President, mainly by limiting Reagan's appearances and
carefully controlling the circumstances.  George Bush has warmly
seized on this legacy.  Though accompanied daily by some 80 reporters
and cameramen, Bush has held only five press conferences since Labor
Day.  On the road in recent weeks, he has rarely ventured back to
chat with the press pool on Air Force Two and frequently stayed in a
separate hotel.  Spontaneity is avoided at all costs.  "It's just
like a sixth-grade field trip," noted Lacy Balzar, 12, after she
accompanied her father John Balzar of the Los Angeles Times on a leg
of the regimented campaign.  "The teachers tell you when you can get
off the bus, where you can stand and when you can eat."  Reporters
found they could learn more by covering Bush headquarters than by
traveling with the candidate.

Obligated to fill their nightly quota of Bush news, the networks went
with what the Bush campaign did offer:  a choreographed scene of the
Vice President framed against the flag, attacking his opponent with
pointed barbs tailored for TV.  Meanwhile, Michael Dukakis was stuck
in another era, holding almost daily press conferences.  On TV he
came across as defensive, weakly responding to Bush's assaults.
After several weeks of losing out in the nightly sound-bite contest,
he learned to play by the new rules:  he withdrew.  The video
campaign was soon in full swing.  Bush went to a flag factory;
Dukakis rode a tank.  "You guys have only yourselves to blame,"
Michael McCurry, Lloyd Bentsen's press secretary, told reporters.
"You reward candidates who are inaccessible, and you punish
candidates who want to be accessible."

By late September the networks decided they had had enough.  Bush and
Dukakis "are going to have to earn their way on to the air," said CBS
News senior producer Brian Healy.  But the conventions of journalism
decree that the candidates are news no matter what they do.  The
networks did their best to air "third stories" on issues such as the
budget deficit and defense, but they often still led their broadcasts
with the obligatory first and second stories:  the candidates' day.
Most network reporters tried to point out the staged quality of the
events they covered, but their brief stories nearly always included
the images and sound bites prepared by the two campaigns.  "If we get
the visual that we want," says a senior Bush campaign adviser, "it
doesn't matter as much what words the networks use in commenting on
it."

More troubling was the fact that both the print and broadcast press
frequently failed to point out the distortions in how the candidates
painted each other's records.  For instance, while many news
organizations reported Bush's charge that Massachusetts furloughed a
first-degree murder named Willie Horton, who proceeded to rape a
woman while on leave, few pointed out that the program had been
instituted under a previous Republican Governor and that many states,
including California under Governor Ronald Reagan, had similar
furlough programs.  Says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, author of a history
of campaign advertising, of the Bush spots:  "Never before in a
presidential campaign have televised ads sponsored by a major party
candidate lied so blatantly."  In their efforts to be fair and
balanced, reporters were also reluctant to single out Bush for the
negative tone of the campaign.  Even though the Vice President was
spending thousands more on negative ads than Dukakis and running them
earlier, reporters generally blamed both sides equally for taking the
low road.

Ironically, many political reporters have rewarded the Bush campaign
for its negative strategy simply because it seems to be working.  In
the rarefied world inhabited by campaign operatives and reporters,
successfully manipulating the process is a virtue in itself.  "You
said that this is a campaign not about ideology, it's about
competence," NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw said to Dukakis last week.
"What about the competence of the campaign?"

TV news executives are already looking back at Campaign '88 and
wondering where they went wrong--and what they can do differently in
1992.  "We have got to reevaluate how we cover campaigns," says Roone
Arledge, ABC News president.  The networks are considering paying
less attention to the made-for-TV conventions, dropping the
requirement for daily sound bites and concentrating on long-range
issues.

By doing more original reporting and refusing to let the campaigns
set the daily agenda for their newscasts, they could force the
candidates to come out of their cocoons.  Then perhaps viewers would
witness a return to the bygone days when reporters and editors were
the ones who picked the sound bites.

--Reported by Dan Goodgame/Washington and Naushad S. Mehta/New York


---------------------------------------------------------
To Endorse or Not

Editorialists hesitate and the Washington Post opts out

Voters who have had a hard time working up enthusiasm for either
George Bush or Michael Dukakis have been learning from their local
newspapers that they are not alone.  Last week the trade weekly
Editor & Publisher reported a surge, from 32% in 1984 to 55% this
year, in the proportion of papers that had either decided not to
endorse a candidate or remained undecided.  Several that did endorse,
including the New York Times and Dukakis' hometown Boston Globe,
voiced uneasiness about both men.  And in a striking setback for
Dukakis, the liberal Washington Post, which had endorsed every
Democratic candidate for President starting with George McGovern in
1972, withheld its support from both contenders.

In a stinging editorial that called this year's contest a "terrible
campaign, a national disappointment," the Post faulted Bush for
rhetoric that was "divisive, unworthy and unfair," but its pivotal
objection was to what it saw as Dukakis' weak grasp of foreign
policy.  Other papers sounded almost regretful at having to choose
either man.  The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer editorial-page backed
Dukakis "unenthusiastically," but pointed out that "voters do not
enjoy the luxury of not endorsing."  The Times decried a "no-issue
campaign" in which George Bush has run "irrelevantly, like someone
seeking to be Grand Inquisitor" and Michael Dukakis had run
"mechanically, like a candidate for Plant Superintendent."  What
tipped the scales to Dukakis for the Times was the budget deficit and
Bush's plan to cut the capital-gains tax; for the Globe, it was Dan
Quayle.

In fact, papers that wavered on Bush frequently cited Quayle as a
reason.  Some pro-Bush papers seemed to be endorsing the Reagan era
ore than embracing Bush himself.  Said the Chicago Tribune:  "All
things considered, the Reagan legacy passing into the hands of a
chosen and experienced heir looks like a better deal for the country
than whatever new deal Governor Dukakis is trying to cook up."  Of
the 772 papers polled by E&P, 242 were for Bush, 103 for Dukakis and
428 on the fence.  But while Dukakis drew more endorsements than
Walter Mondale did in 1984, if fewer than Jimmy Carter in 1980, E&P
reported, Bush was endorsed by fewer papers than backed Ronald Reagan
in either year.

--By William A. Henry III