Presswatch/Printheads vs. Pictureheads

...The book also contains little "news...

...T hese observations constitute the necessary prologue to a consideration of The Acting President...

...Interestingly, they do not say whether they reviewed television news of the past decade...

...Not incidentally, notes also indicate the kind of work the authors themselves have done...

...Indeed, one network reporter, defending to me the possibility of such a book, nonetheless broke off in mid-sentence to say: "Now if you asked me to point to one, I'd have to think about it a minute...

...Whatever went wrong on his watch (Iran-contra, for example) is blamed on Reagan...

...Since this happened on CBS, its inclusion comes as no surprise...

...Come to think of it, they're journalists only on the most generous definition...

...To his credit, he wanted notes...

...The fact that two television journalists have written a book (and I checked: they did write it) that aspires to some degree of seriousness has created a threshold problem for more than a few print journalists...

...I called a half dozen of that variety, all of whom covered the White House during the Reagan years...

...The book, which the flap copy touts as "a history of the Reagan administrations," merits comment for numerous reasons, not least of which is its authorship...

...Pictureheads, in effect, side with Goethe and believe in the superiority of pictures over words...

...Then there are the people once regarded, often well regarded, as "hard" news types who have evolved into entertainers...

...The supply-side movement did not aim to cut "business taxes," but business tax rates—and also personal income tax rates...

...none intended to...

...I asked Schieffer about the lack of 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 notes...

...authors could have hit more strongly...

...diplomat and a Soviet agent...

...Just television," one scoffed...

...Bob Schieffer, the lead author, is the well-known chief Washington correspondent for CBS News...

...Printheads don't make half as much as pictureheads (and none will ever get paid a fraction of what Dan Rather or Diane Sawyer earns...

...Plainly, one cannot dismiss the book purely on account of its authors' professional orientation...

...Indeed, the very fact that the authors, the likable Schieffer in particular, who sometimes anchors the news for CBS, have attempted to write by Terry Eastland a book about the presidency, something not normally done by today's television journalists, counts in their favor...

...Printheads stay Terry Eastland is resident scholar at the National Legal Center for the Public Interest in Washington, D.0 He is writing a book about the lessons for conservative government to be drawn from the Reagan and Bush years...

...It is tempting to agree with this assessment...

...But there's more to the story...

...None of them had read the book...

...Looking back," he said, "I wished we had put them in...

...Reagan was an actor, true, and used his acting skills while President...

...with the gospel writer (at least on this item) and believe in the superiority of the written word, looking down their noses at their rich and famous media cousins (though not at producers who pay them to go on "talk shows," but that's another story...

...Earlier this year ABC did in fact fake footage of an alleged exchange between a U.S...

...As one can tell from a study of his many speeches, which form the Reagan logos (Greek for "word"), ideas mattered to Reagan...

...And any serious treatment must understand and analyze the policies and programs that drew upon these ideas, and the post-Watergate political milieu in which they were proposed...

...rr he book's most serious flaw lies in 1 its approach to the Reagan presidency...

...Anyone familiar with news accounts of Reagan from the past decade, or with Lou Cannon's Reagan (1982), Laurence Barrett's Gambling With History (1983), and Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus's Landslide (1988) will find The Acting President a largely derivative work...

...Whatever went right (the 1981 legislative successes) is credited to his aides, or at least certain of them—Jim Baker and Michael Deaver, whom the authors interviewed for this book...

...answer: it was...

...The publisher didn't, on grounds that notes would make the book too academic—i.e., less marketable...

...In this world, what presidential aides say is often more important than what the President says, and of course aides can speak to journalists in a way Presidents generally do not—on "background...

...Here as in other journalism on Reagan, and as in many of the memoirs by former aides (journalists and high government officials have more in common than one might suppose), personalities become more important than ideas, and there is little historical or institutional perspective...

...CNN's Linda Ellerbee hawks Maxwell House coffee for big sums, and NBC's erstwhile sunrise newsreader Deborah Norville, who will soon replace Jane Pauley on the "Today" show, goes to Hawaii to counsel a major corporation on matters of advertising (with NBC's approval...

...To begin with, the writing is for the most part pedestrian ("In Washington, policy is made by managing the continual compromises that must be struck between the executive and legislative branches") and marred by obvious factual errors...

...These are generalizations, I know, but they're helpful in understanding the print reaction to the book...

...His co-author, Gary Paul Gates, is a former CBS reporter who has written books with Mike Wallace and Dan Rather, two other CBS journalists (I almost said "stars...

...Or consider CBS's Connie Chung, who now has her own "Saturday Night With Connie Chung...

...Eventually, we came up with David Brinkley's recent offering, Washington Goes to War...

...He also delegated authority, and was disengaged to the point of being, at times, an irresponsible President (a point, by the way, the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 41...

...And it is not the attorney general but a special court that appoints independent counsels...

...If The Acting President had taken the form of a television series, a bunch of pictures, that would have been one thing...

...But The Acting President has no footnotes, a mistake in a work purporting to be a "history of the Reagan administrations...

...Serious journalists, no way...

...Earlier on Saturdays she wears her other hat as a CBS news anchor, at which time the viewer is supposed to assume that she is presiding over the presentation of real events...

...But Reagan and Landslide had notes and did fine in the marketplace...

...Because pictureheads think they advance the news better than print-heads, particularly in political campaigns, they see themselves as a kind of historical cutting edge...

...And in 1986 NBC showed pictures of an Italian cement factory and told viewers it was the Chernobyl nuclear power plant...

...This caricature has been drawn so many times before that it boggles the mind why a publisher should think it has to be drawn yet again...

...But 90 percent of the book is old stuff...

...But it took the form of words, and, for many print journalists, nothing good in the way of words can come from television news types...

...Sawyer's earring, which fell off early on, would be reattached when the camera turned to Sam...

...Consider, for example, the team of Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer,the "stars" of ABC's new show "Prime Time Live...

...John may have written, "In the beginning was the word," but centuries later Goethe said, revising the disciple and presaging television, "In the beginning was the act...

...It's a project that's definitely worthier than, say, Chung's "Saturday Night" venture...

...The dominant theme of The Acting President is that Reagan, the former actor, was a disengaged, hands-off President who acted his way into the presidency and through it, his advisers working in effect as stage hands, ready with cue cards and other props...

...This approach, which yields the "inside" or "real" story of an administration, produced The Acting President...

...To fail in these respects,and to reduce Reagan to the acting President—indeed to elevate chosen aides (those skilled at talking to the media) over him—is to diminish and demean the most successful presidency since Eisenhower's...

...It does provide the first complete account of Dan Rather's famous interview with George Bush in which Bush tore after Rather in order to dispel his "wimp" image...

...No matter whose name had been on the marquee, when the Reagan administration was at its best it had been people like Baker and [Richard] Darman who had kept the White House running...

...Notes are essential in a book of this kind because they provide students of the Reagan years the kind of documentation necessary for comparison and further inquiry...

...PICTUREHEADS T he latest journalistic treatment of I Ronald Reagan is The Acting President, published by E. P. Dutton this past summer, with a huge first run of 75,000 copies...

...To be sure, none of this means that one should automatically conclude that no one in television news is capable of writing a serious or important book...

...It will be a test of those books to see whether they err in the same huge way as The Acting President...

...Coffee drinkers, they are...

...That says a lot...

...News on television (with the exception of MacNeil-Lehrer) has become harder and harder to take seriously, in part because it is harder and harder to take seriously as journalists some of the people who give us the news...

...One passage sums it up: "Ronald Reagan had very little to do with his administration and the issues that came before it...

...It is possible, if improbable...

...Obviously, there's some rivalry between "printheads," as television types derisively call print journalists, as we learned last month from Fred Barnes, and "pictureheads," if I may coin a word...

...On that show, Chung presides over the presentation of events "recreated" or even entirely made up...

...The authors of The Acting President made no effort to transcend the parochial world of Washington journalism, print or picture, fascinated as so much of it daily is with who's up and who's down, who hit Jack and who bopped Jill...

...Any serious treatment of the Reagan years must grasp the importance to Reagan and his administration of these ideas, which include that of limited government at home, and strength in defense of America abroad...

...it's worth noting that a major question on the program's second installment was whether Ms...

...More books on Reagan are in the works, by journalists and others...

...And they mattered politically in his climb to the White House and also in his tenure while there...

...Schieffer and Gates do acknowledge their reliance on those and other Reagan books, as well as on newspaper and magazine articles...

...And it produces an actual copy of the late 1980 memo whereby Jim Baker appeared to "divide" up duties with Ed Meese, a memo that effectively empowered Baker at Meese's expense...

...Still, when judged as any book of this kind should be—on its merits—The Acting President is not a good book...

...This fall CBS has been accused of using fake battle footage from Afghanistan (in an award-winning broadcast in 1984...

...Finally, they mention that they have conducted "scores of interviews...

...Yet such an assumption is open to question these days, no matter which network news show you tune in...

...Here the word precisely fits...

...Reagan was once an actor, but he became a political figure, and he cannot be understood apart from this fact...