In the Season of Our Roone
Gold, Vic
"In the Season of Our Roone" thoroughly secularized terms, by Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and the German fascists—the latter of whom had no difficulty supplying a novus dux to preside over their Third and (as they fondly...
...The 30-minute show on Joe McCarthy, yes...
...We will...
...in fact, inevitable...
...One looking up the quarterback's molars as he calls signals...
...Nothing wrong with that, but let's not let the Chayefsky-Schorr crowd kid us: From Ed Murrow to Howard Cosell there is a direct, undeviating line of medialogical descent...
...how to cross a sea, even the narrow confines of a lagoon...
...Consider now that In the Season of Our Roone 14, which is to say, 1963, nearly a decadeand-a-half after the coaxial serpent was stretched coast-to-coast, Isent National Review an item based on television's seasonal programming...
...Then, a few years later, John F. Kennedy made his mediagenic mark sitting beside John McClellan during the Senate's anti-laborracketeering hearings, so-called...
...It has no charismatic leader to gather together and direct its energies in what Joachim saw as the indispensable climactic battle between the forces of good and evil...
...Television was supposed to give us more than radio, but as it developed, TV, no less than radio, abhors a sound vacuum...
...I remember his phrase exactly...
...Manor Torcello, Isle of Refuge When winter fogs descend upon the Adriatic, the lagoon of Venice and its attractive islands disappear from view...
...Well, the editors sent it back...
...Not unlike the British who during the Second World War were saved from Hitler by the narrow Channel, the inhabitants of Altinum were spared by the waters of the lagoon...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...but who in fact was a victim of premature birth...
...Yet, as the incarcerated Sir Thomas Malory might glumly wonder, what human enterprise made up of men and women soon hot, soon cold, ever managed to avoid being taken over by a novus dux possessed by the imperatives of his own grand story...
...Stuffy Buckleys...
...Vic Gold In the Season of Our Roone Roone Arledge, who has been running the Ameri- can Broadcasting Company's television sports division since the afternoon Goliath whipped David—with Roone's productions, you see, it's sometimes hard to follow the action—anyway, Roone has now extended his empire to include ABC television news...
...Even National Review concedes the point...
...David and Goliath is a good match, a little extra riding on the outcome, winner-take-all...
...Thus wrote Ruskin in his The Stones of Venice, first published in 1853...
...Something...
...And we do...
...Nobody around here watches television...
...Another looking up a pom-pom girl's miniskirt as she does her aerial splits...
...Caligula's horse of Monday-night commentary...
...In its heart it is too anarchistic, too equalitarian, too committed to self-actualization, too afraid of the elite-forming impulses of the oldhoarding, mystifying, and taboo-structured love, to encourage the appearance, let alone the acceptance, of a novus dux...
...Chatter and shifting images: No one does it better than Roone Arledge...
...The Associated Press, in its dull, laconic way, can tell us what is happening...
...And they die...
...which is why Roone gave this sports-manic nation the Vic Gold's latest book is PR as in President...
...Nor does anyone better understand how the superstar system works...
...Television has always been and remains an entertainment, not an information, form...
...F.S...
...So he talks...
...Ignore all this idle talk about a decline in the number of sets in use...
...When the mist lifts, one can discern, far off, the lights of Venice, the sinking jewel that might not outlast our millennium...
...It must believe that the forces of change and growth are on its side, as if directed by a hidden hand, so that its wondrous adventure is safe from those hazards that in the past have turned world-altering romance into tragedy or farce...
...In the Year of Our Ford was an outrageous pun, but it made its point...
...But with a nice note: "This may be funny," they assured me, "but we really can't tell...
...And here, if indeed it is in the Joachite tradition, the Party of Growth has a real problem...
...Howard Cosell brings meaning to a simple game...
...And let's not forget the superstars...
...Fantastic mists drift over the vast expanse of sea that mirrors the gloomy skies, the lagoon and skies seeming an organic whole cocooned by the mist in a strange universe of their own...
...Roone and his fellow Roones will get those sets back in service, tuned in to Son of Roots, the David-Goliath rematch, a docudrama on the Resurrection (as a promo for the Second Coming), with one of Roone's prize performers interviewing Magdalene...
...Occasionally, the shutters of the cathedral, this place of refuge and consolation, flap in the wind, scaring seagulls and rooks that rise in a bedlam of cacophony, like angry spirits roused from the dim past...
...But that extra dimension is needed to bring the audience to your channel...
...In winter, this is a scene of soft melancholy, and as one discerns through the mist the red-brick campanile of Torcello, old, lonely, and abandoned, one thinks of a finger—the last finger to have remained in this empty world—pointed to the invisible skies, a gesture at once of anguish, supplication, and despair...
...But, of course, that's show biz, and Ed Murrow was show biz, from the theatrical arch of his brow to the miasma of cigarette smoke swirling around his head...
...The flames rose from the ruins of Altinum...
...And again I vented spleen...
...Roone knows this first principle of successful news and special-event production...
...Now Paddy Chayefsky, who broke in with the network during the putative "Golden Age" of the medium, wins awards writing screenplays ridiculing television news in terms even Agnew didn't risk...
...And Daniel Schorr, an erstwhile network demisuperstar, lays into the CBS brass like a convert who learned his catechism from Pat Buchanan...
...True, assaulting television hardly seems worth the effort anymore...
...And again 16 The American Spectator March 1978...
...But it remains for television to give the event meaning, which, in the jargon of the trade, they call color commentary...
...after which, to be frank about it, the issue of television's Evil Eye on the body politic began to pall, in inverse ratio to the rising systolic-diastolic readings of my middle years...
...the dead, mutilated and dishonored, lying amidst the rubble of the once familiar streets...
...But malnutrition was the story, and as CBS pointed out, the essential truth, apart from such minor factual discrepancies, is that there are infants suffering from malnutrition in this country...
...Walter's forte, understand, is his ability to give dimension to the immeasurable...
...Just this: First, to set the record straight for members of the under-40 generation, let me point out that the medium has not declined in the way Chayefsky would have you believe...
...So what is there to add...
...He does this by reverential allusion to the sainted Edward R. Murrow...
...Aldous Huxley couldn't have done better...
...Today, Torcello is a deserted island...
...thoroughly secularized terms, by Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and the German fascists—the latter of whom had no difficulty supplying a novus dux to preside over their Third and (as they fondly believed) final Reich...
...Remember Cronkite yammering at the very instant of the first moon landing...
...JERUSALEM, April 14 (AP)—The Second Coming occurred today, according to...
...Thirteen hundred years ago, the grey moorland looked as it does this day, and the purple mountain stood as radiantly in the deep distances of evening...
...This indeed was the anguish of the people who built the campanile of Torcello, an island that had offered them refuge because the Huns first, and the Langobards later, did not know F.S...
...He understands the importance of keeping the viewer awake not only by incessant sound, but by the incessant shifting video imagery...
...men and women who don't know the wars are over...
...All beside the point: The Roones couldn't care less whether we like television...
...Or are there any others left: cultural samurai wandering the jungle islands of what they delude themselves to be pre-coaxial America...
...No, they still don't like television, but they acknowledge its existence...
...In Network, for one example, Chayefsky feeds the myth that once there was a Camelot of small-screen excellence, particularly in the news field...
...No human voices are heard of a winter afternoon...
...Joe McCarthy couldn't have stated the defense much better...
...the lament from the multitude of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the paths of the sea...
...Excommunicants by personal choice, out of touch with their neighbors...
...Apart from any personal ennui about the subject, it has become a veritable cafeteria of sociopolitical bitching, an area of critical commentary so crowded that one has to stand in line to get a hearing...
...We, the children of the twentieth century, know the depth of this anguish: the burning homes...
...Roone knows that in the world of televent coverage, the Whoo is more important than the What...
...They call it "dead air...
...The color of this melancholy world is a lurid, ashen grey—Ruskin' s description—and as one ploughs on a motorboat through the primeval seascape one feels strangely affected, as if one had reached a point at which the past and the future converge in kindred suffering...
...loose ends about war, politics, crime, and the economy, to be tied into so many compressed packages, like football quarters, halves, and two-minute warnings...
...So what if their reviews are damning...
...Murrow: the progenitor of Eric Sevareid, one-fourth newsman, three-fourths entertainer, all the sacred cow dung about his being a legend of electronic journalism notwithstanding...
...How apt a name...
...and also that opener in "Hunger in America," which won him an Emmy: The scene focused on an infant who, we were told, had died of malnutrition...
...They, after all, are what most distinguishes television news from print news...
...the implacable advance of an enemy who knows no mercy...
...There were, in 1951, the Kefauver anti-crime hearings, so-called, one of the medium's first special events, Estes the Cleanjean Country Boy versus the Mob: a six-week travesty, the primary purpose of which was to launch Cleanjean's 1952 presidential campaign...
...That is why we never get a 50-yard line seat at a televised football game, but a dozen seats...
...Just as well...
...Everybody, it seems, is fighting the television news monster these days, to the extent that Koestler may be proven wrong: Will the last battle be between the Communists and the ex-Communists, or between CBS-TV and former employees of CBS-TV...
...That's only a temporary aberration...
...McLuhan, in his coherent moments, is right (he may even be right in his incoherent moments, but I leave that to Ruth Carter Stapleton and others who listen in tongues...
...Good old Buckleys...
...In the annals of television reviewing, 98 percent of everything that has been written and said runs to excoriation, damnation, the sick heaves...
...but first, a break for our ABC stations around the country, after which we'll return for a between-rounds interview with that wonderful lady, a dear personal friend with whom I had the privilege of having dinner last evening, Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late...
...and it is in fact considered deadly, the assumption being that the viewer, left to his own inner resources, will doze off between, say, the moment the astronaut's foot touches moondust and the upcoming commercial...
...He adds dimension: And there is David, the fine young lad I was speaking to just before we came on the air...
...Can you imagine...
...The monster has won...
...Understand, I was venting spleen about television's distorted news values when Spiro Agnew was a struggling lawyer just out of Baltimore night school...
...There's a story behind that young man, Frank, how he...
...It was a fairly funny bit, something about Averell Harriman traveling the globe as a western word-slinger, titled Have Gun, Will Cavil...
...only the sound of the Adriatic, lapping monotonously at the shores of honeysuckle and briar, disturbs the peace that the mist has rendered absolute...
...Yet another at the blimp...
...Television news, served up by any of the networks, has always been treated like a game...
...When Howard or Geraldo or Barbara is asking Magdalene what went through her mind that morning when she first noticed that the stone had moved, docudrama or not, we will be watching...
...All that matters is that we watch it...
...He said, "Wh000...
...Sooner or later we must turn the set back on...
...A s a veteran of the Agnew wars against network news I took an oath some years ago never to write another serious word about the small-screen monster...
...Oh, I remember Murrow...
...And because Roone Arledge is the best special-event impressario around, I am willing to wager that should the Second Coming be delayed until 1980 or 1981—long enough, that is, for the man to make his presence felt—ABC will be first among the Three Wise Networks to spread the news...
...but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand...
...But some fires, I find, are not easily stoked...
...You know it, I know it...
...The wars are over...
...and again a hell of a lot of good it did...
...Finally, there were the Agnew wars...
...because, in truth, The American Spectator March 1978 15 there was never a "Golden Age" of television--certainly not of television news...
...To the networks that focus the camera's eye on those events which alter and illuminate our times, silence is anything but golden...
...They were the last holdouts...
...Goddammit...
...And back to the pom-pom girl...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
