People for the Televised Way
Coulson, Crocker
Crocker Coulson PEOPLE FOR THE TELEVISED WAY Norman Lear is proud to be an American. Because the television commercial is the single most voluminous form of public communication today, it was...
...While Kurtz says he double-checks all information, his coverage of judicial nominations last summer often mirrored the concerns expressed in People For briefing papers...
...In the 1980s, the brochure continues, it is left to People For to roll back the forces that threaten Americans' cherished liberties...
...It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of the point being made...
...People For mailings are littered with words like "extremist" and "ultra-fundamentalist" whose purpose is less to elucidate arguments than to disqualify their targets from participatingin the political process...
...While People For's video orientation has filled its coffers and permits it to call down showers of mail on selected congressmen, it has also had a certain cost in the sophistication of its arguments...
...The organization's latest fundraising scheme is to create a video network using a taped version of "The People For Story...
...People For uses mailing lists from Brooks Brothers, TWA Ambassador Club, and high-ticket catalogues, as well as more political sources...
...paper $10.95 "Looks in some ways like the opening gun in the approaching reaction against the Reaganite, or neoconservative, view of the world...
...The group's mailings feature surveys, "time-dated" material, and reports of the latest evangelical outrages gleaned from hours of television watching...
...Yet this is precisely the tone of People For's analysis of the religious right, which disqualifies rather than contests the views they oppose...
...T hough Manion now sits on the I bench, his confirmation was an impressive display of People For's ability to focus public attention swiftly and sharply...
...Much of this power results from People For's success in adopting the techniques of electronic politics honed by the New Right...
...Video preachers like Robertson, Swaggart, James Robinson, and Falwell have been able to attract millions of followers and build their multimillion dollar empires because those they preach to are profoundly alienated from the values of the surrounding society...
...A coalition of religious right groups is reportedly exploring a similar move against People For...
...squinty-eyed, hog-jowled Ed Meese) and easily swallowed political ideals (tolerance, freedom, "the American Way...
...The Inside Story on Political Insiders "In Secrets ofState...there is a lot of accumulated wisdom about the senior department of government, how it operates or doesn't and the eternal clashes between the professional foreign service officers and the president and his political appointees:'—Washington Post Book World "Filled with candid yet balanced, often fascinating, appraisals of the leading actors:' —Baltimore Sun Secrets of State, a history of American foreign policymaking, accurately predicted Irangate, the Reagan administration's most severe foreign policy crisis to date...
...The report reeled through Robertson's statements about Social Security (should be dismantled), the Federal Reserve (possibly unconstitutional), and state laws (shouldn't be subject to the Supreme Court...
...351 pp...
...paper 87.95 Al better hookviores or directly from OXFORD PAPERBACKS Oxford University Press • 200 Madison Avenue • New York, NY 10016 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987...
...Driven by a $190,000 People For advertising campaign, letters poured into Senate offices and Manion's confirmation was suddenly worthy of front page coverage...
...To make an apparently arcane issue sexy, People For produced TV spots comparing judicial appointments to jury selection, a process with which most voters are familiar...
...Today the group has a membership of 250,000 and an annual budget of over $8 million—matching that of the conservative groups it was meant to combat...
...In Indiana, Seidman discovered that Manion had sponsored a bill to teach creationism in the schools and another to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms—despite the fact that a similar statute had recently been struck down by the Supreme Court...
...A newspaper ad always says less than a newsletter, which says less than a position paper...
...Lear himself has refused to debate Falwell on numerous occasions, on the grounds that "it would risk trivializing the issues...
...As Neil Postman writes in his work on the epistemology of television, "the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes time and invites argument...
...People For found an opening when the Reagan Administration chose to nominate Daniel Manion, a conservative state senator from Indiana with negligible experience in constitutional law, to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals...
...paper $8.95 "A provocative attack on the notion that only a handful of experts should make nuclear arms policy...Meticulously researched:'—Dave Griffiths, Business Week "Brilliant...incisive...The focus of Herken's compelling study is the cluster of scientists and strategists on campuses, in government agencies, and at institutions such as Rand who, ever since Hiroshima, have been thinking about the unthinkable:'—William E. Leuchtenburg, Washington Post Book World The first book to trace the deliberations and shifting recommendations of civilian experts on the bomb from Hiroshima to the Reagan administration, Counsels of War is now expanded to include discussion of "Star Wars" and the possibility of nuclear winter...
...Reagan was trying to accomplish through the courts what he couldn't do in Congress...
...The costs of this success have yet to be assessed...
...rr he conventional wisdom among leftish political commentators holds that Ronald Reagan's presidency is, in some meaningful sense, the unique product of the age of television...
...Lear said he had been shocked into action after watching 100 hours of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson while researching a movie about TV preachers (which has yet to be made...
...To watch People For's videos on the Christian right and Christian Voice's video on People For in quick succession is an unnerving experience...
...Rather than stepping beyond the constraints of the political process, the scorecards represent the evangelicals' desire to get into the game...
...Unwittingly, perhaps, People For have contributed to a phenomenon they refer to as "Moral McCarthyism...
...Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death In 1980 a 60-second commercial featuring a burly forklift operator aired on television stations in New York and Washington...
...We don't claim to speak for all Christians...
...They are both television preachers with a natural capacity for packaging the pieties of their separate worlds...
...Its work in judicial confirmation was marked by a more measured tone and greater intellectual depth than its assaults on the religious right...
...For all its excesses People for the American Way has succeeded in demonstrating that populism need not be equated with Reaganism...
...At the time, Senate approval of Reagan candidates for federal district courts was almost routine, opposed by a few low-key groups like the Judicial Selection Project and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights but attracting little attention in the press...
...Upon returning to Washington, Seidman sent an 18-page report to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that detailed the questionable elements in Manion'srecord and called for a second hearing...
...but to disparage either is hardly to strike a blow for "tolerance...
...While conservatives like to refer to them as "leftists," People For has made a conscious effort to secure the middle ground...
...While many of these leaders are shown to have been occasionally impolitic (Weyrich: "Ultimately everything can be reduced to a question of right or wrong...
...The contrast with previous efforts by individual senators to block J. Harvey Wilkerson (4th Circuit Court of Appeals) and Alex Kozinski (9th Circuit Court of Appeals) was striking, according to Senate staffers...
...Both advance political ideals that few could disagree with and share television's conceit of giving you the big picture even as it selects and distorts and obscures the issues...
...The book's contributors are] exceptionally distinguished...
...Alternating shots of televangelists and the Berlin book burning of 1932 complete the crude historical analogy...
...We are not told that Weyrich is Catholic, or that Phillips is Jewish...
...The edge-of-the-apocalypse tone and the villainizing of right-wing leaders mirrors the tactics of the enemy...
...By this month, over 100,000 copies of the tape will have been distributed to members who are each supposed to invite ten neighbors to watch it on the VCR to build the base of support...
...448 pp...
...If this stuff isn't comprehensible to them then we've failed in our mission...
...A letter signed by Kropp even was sent to "cream Republicans," warning them about the religious right's effort to take over the party of country clubbers...
...and] the changes they ring on the theme of U.S...
...Before joining People For, Podesta did public relations work for Ted Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and the Machinists Union...
...phis antagonistic attitude would be 1 forgivable if People For didn't have the pretense of being a "neutral referee" in all matters of Church and State...
...Background papers are sent out to a network of 1700 newspapers and 300 radio shows, producing "investigative" stories for reporters too busy to investigate on their own...
...One case study of how People For operates concerns the issue of judicial nominations—selected by People For's directors as a target in January 1985...
...Essentially the Administration had decided that the quality of judges didn't matter...
...Television, the medium of the perpetual present, allows Reagan to distort history, play havoc with the facts, ignore sequential logic and still come off as convincing, even sincere...
...Norman Lear, the Moral Majority's missives reply, is a deceitful "anti-Christian bigot" who pipes "sexual perversion into our living rooms...
...The spot was the creation of television producer Norman Lear—progenitor of such '70s network standbys as "All in the Family," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," and "Maude...
...he was disturbed, he said, by certain television preachers who expounded a "Christian position on political issues...
...Throughout 1985 the group began to dig into the process by which judges were being chosen and discovered that hard-right senators Jesse Helms and the late John East were screening candidates on abortion and civil-rights decisions before they were even officially nominated...
...That it couldn't possibly become an issue," recalls People For director Anthony Podesta...
...People For's briefing paper also mocked Robertson for believing that his prayers turned Hurricane Gloria away from CNN's Virginia Beach headquarters, which is a bit like ridiculing an Orthodox Jew for refusing to throw a light switch on the Sabbath...
...They view their mission in life to get publicity...
...That would be good for another 100,000 members...
...In the 1840s it was the 'Know Nothings,' in the 1860s it was the Successionists, and the early 1950s is known as the 'McCarthy Era...
...In one ad, Lloyd Bridges notes that "if you're called for jury duty, and they find out you've already made up your mind about the case . . . you're disqualified...
...To the secular mind, each belief seems equally ludicrous...
...For example, the group has singled out Christian Voice, whose scorecards rating congressional candidates on abortion and anti-Communism reach millions of followers, as an improper admixture of religion and politics...
...censorship, freedom of information, and judicial selection, harrying the Reagan Administration at every flank...
...And the greatest source of those associations was People for the American Way...
...People For's expose of the New Right, entitled "Life and Liberty . . . For All Who Believe," exemplifies this trend...
...The group has won the right to respond to Jimmy Swaggart and to Robertson's "700 Club" by using the Fairness Doctrine and sought to deprive both Robertson and Falwell of their tax exempt status...
...And the fundamentalists' belligerence and insularity are a product of perceived weakness, not of strength...
...each is reduced to a shadowy "they...
...But rather than deal with the substance of his views—some of which are highly defensible—the paper simply labeled them as "outside of the political mainstream...
...It is counterproductive . . . for groups like PAW to retaliate against new right extremism with its own form of extremist propaganda," Higgins wrote in his letter of resignation...
...Past producers of People For ads include Joe Rothstein and Tony Schwartz, creator of the 1964 "daisy petal" advertisement smearing Barry Goldwater as the Armageddon candidate...
...People For contributors fit the yuppie profile quite nicely: 39 percent are professionals, 70 percent have a college degree, and 35 percent make over $50,000...
...Eventually new tapes may be distributed regularly as issues arise...
...the portrait of the movement lacks any shading or gradation...
...An editorial in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal characterized Lear as being "to politics much what Jerry Falwell is to theology...
...Within days 12,000 frightened citizens had phoned the 800 number that was flashed on the screen, and soon after Lear assembled an organization known as People for the American Way...
...Then I found a letter written when his father died where Manion endorsed the Birch Society as being 'on the front line of the fight for Constitutional freedom...
...Howard Kurtz, who covers the Justice Department for the Washington Post, says thathe's found People For to be "a good source of news...
...In Podesta's words, "I won't claim that direct mail doesn't simplify and even exaggerate...
...People For traces its lineage through the historic struggle between enlightenment and intolerance: "Throughout American history groups and individuals who threaten liberty have surfaced periodically," a People For brochure declares...
...An example of this technique was the paper "Pat Robertson: Extremist" and accompanying clips from Robertson's "700 Club" that People For distributed when Pat announced his candidacy last August...
...More than any other group, People for the American Way has sought to bring liberalism into the age of video...
...U nfortunately, People For's depiction of the Christian right as alternately a collection of pathetic ignoramuses or a dangerous and monolithic conspiracy has increasingly set the standard for coverage throughout the elite press...
...If this is People For's mission, it has certainly succeeded...
...He chose to buy time in Washington since "I knew that the nightly news shows—Rather and Jennings—would have to cover it and we'd get free air time...
...People For's list of "Election Guidelines," which proscribe candidates from "claiming divine or scriptural sanction for their views on controversial public issues," are simply absurd when applied to a Pentecostal like Robertson, who believes God advises him about even the most trivial issues of his daily life...
...Out of fear of offending special interest groups, the texts seriously distorted the importance of religion in the New World, he said...
...Because I was a creature of television it occurred to me only to answer in that media," says Lear...
...The documentary, produced by veteran filmmaker Sherry Jones, lumps together New Right leaders Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips, televangelists like Falwell and Robertson, and book burners in Maryland...
...Rather than a pro forma approval, the issue became a bitterly fought referendum on the Administration's judicial philosophy...
...When Jerry Falwell announced last year that the Moral Majority would be renamed the Liberty Federation, the strongest factor in his decision was the negative connotations the name Moral Majority had in the public mind...
...The group has a genius for creating dramatic figures of evil (raving fundamentalist fuhrers...
...However, as the Reagan era draws to a close, People For may be maturing as well...
...During six thin years in Washington for liberal advocacy groups, People for the American Way has been the high-profile, high-growth exception...
...Podesta's planned departure in May 1988 may also reduce the group's allegiance to the left wing of the Democratic party...
...A recent editorial by Podesta in the Wall Street Journal, for example, upbraided textbook publishers for avoiding all references to religion in American history textbooks...
...People For investigators probe for illicit or scandalous ties between Administration officials and the religious right...
...There were 120 boxes full of stuff and I had only a few days to go through it," Seidman says...
...estrangement' from the world are various [and] stimulating:'—Edwin M. Yoder, Jr, Washington Post Book World "Should be required reading for all members of the American elite :'—The Economist Contributions by Frances FitzGerald, Lester Thurow, Geoffrey Hodgson, and others 368 pp...
...Reagan, the theory holds, represents an ideology that is driven by images and emotion rather than logic...
...We always make our argument to the people in the 39th Ward...
...The staff churns out over sixty op-eds a year and places its speakers and opinions on a stable of radio and television shows...
...The danger of matching the hyperPeople For's greatest strength is its knack for summoning up squalls of print and television coverage sympathetic to the positions it takes...
...Sitting in a spacious office, beneath a gilt wooden eagle, Podesta spits out his responses in ten-second sound bites—honed during countless appearances on the evening news...
...Norman is originally from New Haven and.I'm from the 39th Ward of Chicago...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 17 bole of the right with that of the secular left is that it erodes an already tenuous ground for understanding, further polarizing a divided political discourse...
...Msgr...
...The best thing that could happen to us is if Pat Robertson's campaign takes off," says Kropp...
...We're not opposed to religious people participating in politics," says Podesta...
...Because the television commercial is the single most voluminous form of public communication today, it was inevitable that Americans would accommodate themselves to the philosophy of television commercials...
...The staff includes both Republicans and Democrats, and the ideals it purports to hold are 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 ones that no one could disagree with...
...And each scorecard even includes a disclaimer that it is not "intended . . . to be a statistical judgment of a person's moral behavior or relationship with God...
...When we started to look into judgeships we were told by the political community on the Hill and the press that no one cared who filled these seats on the bench...
...More significantly, both Lear and his foes seem to be reassessing the impact that television has had on the stability of the values they advocate...
...Kropp, who has the hand-shaking manner and bland good looks of a hundred Washington fundraisers, joined People For when he realized that "the formerly lunatic right now increasingly defined what it meant to be a Republican...
...Just as it is reasonable to ask what remains of a faith that has been filtered through a cathode tube, it is uncertain how long liberal political values can survive in a marketplace of instant gratification...
...Researcher Ricki Seidman flew out to Chicago where the collected papers of Manion's father Clarence, a founder of the John Birch Society, were stored at the Chicago Historical Society...
...Just as conservatism has begun to establish itself as an intellectual as well as a political force in Washington, People For will have to substitute guile for fervor if it wants to remain politically relevant...
...I've spent a lot of time thinking about how you shape the news," he says...
...So ought to be the case with judicial selection, Bridges implied, finishing with a rhetorical "Isn't that the American way...
...William Lind, in a widely touted article on "cultural conservatism" published by Paul Weyrich, worries about "the effect of television, not only in preaching instant gratification and materialism, but perhaps even more in its essence as a non-responsive medium...
...Jerry Falwell, the mailings say, is a "dangerous extremist" seeking to subvert the schools, the courts, and the federalgovernment...
...But under the direction of Arthur Kropp, who was trained in direct mail techniques at the Republican National Committee, direct mail donations have come to make up 70 percent of the People For budget, with an average contribution of $25...
...As a result, the argument goes, politics during the Reagan era have been dominated by visual affect and outrageous metaphor, to the detriment of sound policy and, of late, even legality...
...And a network of activist members keeps tabs on censorship cases across the land...
...In addition to downplaying diversity in the right, People For's publications evince no desire to understand the roots of fundamentalism, much of which is a reaction to the hedonistic, amoral world that was being broadcast to American homes on Lear's prime-time television...
...ideology was the only issue," Podesta says...
...According to Christian Voice chairman Robert Grant, "the scorecard is pure and simple voter education material about issues that conservative Christians are concerned about...
...The press coverage of the "Scopes II" textbook case in Tennessee exhibited little more sympathy for freakish Vicky Frost than H. L. Mencken and the Northern journalists of the 1920s showed for her forebears...
...There are also signs that People For may be broadening its understanding of "tolerance" as it applies to religion...
...Our strategy has not been to rely on elite remedies but to be willing to go through the democratic process," says Podesta...
...They're one of the slickest, most media-oriented groups around...
...Traditionally liberal advocacy groups have either relied on a small number of wealthy donors or engaged in exhausting house-to-house canvassing to finance their Washington office...
...But when they say that they speak for the Bible, or that their opponents are in league with Satan, it suggests that the other side is not wrong, but somehow illegitimate...
...But by depriving them of any context or motivation, People For's videos render the fundamentalists' statements completely irrational...
...Eventually, Manion was confirmed by a 49-49 vote before the full Senate on July 23, but at a tremendous political cost to the Administration...
...Falwell: "Why do we have to compromise to please anybody...
...But Christian Voice is one of hundreds of Washington groups that rate candidates, and liberal clergymen are as likely to find scriptural justification for their views as Christian Voice is...
...From its office in northwest Washington, the group monitors the every utterance of televangelists and tracks the proliferation of right-wing cause groups...
...Initially envisioned as a response to the Moral Majority, People For has branched out to such areas as textbook Crocker Coulson is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic...
...George Higgins, of Washington's Catholic University, resigned from People For's board of directors in 1982 after viewing "Life and Liberty...
...A common refrain on the Hill, even among Republicans, is `No more Manions,' " Podesta says...
...Increasingly, media coverage of the religious right and Edwin Meese's Justice Department has come to bear the People For imprint, with reporters from Newsweek to the MacNeil-Lehrer show relying on the group for their information...
...An eye-opening analysis of how foreign policy decisions are made, who makes them, and how they are implemented, the book draws on memoirs and archival documents, as well as interviews with more than 150 government officials...
...before we were around the only Christian voices were those, like the National Council of Churches, on the left...
...People For's tactics have cost it support among some religious leaders...
...But People For's greatest strength is its knack for summoning up squalls of print and television coverage sympathetic to the positions it takes...
...It is a concern that is echoed by Lear's assertion that "America has become a game show," in which concern for the commonweal has been supplanted by a "Commonwheel of fortune...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
