White House pillars

...you get in close...

...But as a visual convenience for network news the White House facade is in a class by itself...

...I was put up overnight in a first-class hotel, fed a first-class breakfast, and escorted then to Lafayette Park, where on a park bench I delivered some tourist-class opinions...

...The small ring—not a big playing space like a baseball diamond...

...Arledge can painlessly mingle sports television 4 July 1980: 405 with news television I may be allowed to transfer his quotation from the one to the other...

...You fight with them...

...An hour later, as I was sitting in the park, avoiding the pigeons, confessing that I didn't care which side of me was exposed to the World News Tonight, and watching the crew arrange its cameras to capture the one bench, the two heads, and the four columns, I heard Mr...

...I learned from Mr...

...Donaldson say "Now it's time for Donaldson's Law...

...So Congress fades, and the Supreme Court is reduced to unintelligible pen sketches and unintelligible sixty-second summaries of complicated decisions...

...He repeatedly referred to the CBS Evening News as "The Cronkite Show," and he said that the networks use the White House assignment to "showcase" their "stars...

...Because it fits its own nature and convenience...

...It has all the elements of every kind of television that fascinates people...

...These events engaged the public in the conversation of politics, as interviews by correspondents sticking microphones in the face of people in hallways do not do...

...Marvin and Bernard Kalb at the State Department for CBS tend to be indoor reporters...

...The star is the network's anchor person or correspondent...

...you get to know him...

...The symbol of the situation is this: Again and again the TV interviewer, even if not Barbara Walters, is better known than the interviewee...

...And the presidency grows if not in actual power at least in cultural centrality...

...The networks are intensely competitive, of course, as this nightly scramble testifies, and they must provide something for my eyes to feast upon other than the changing neckties, or hairdos, of the correspondents That seasonally varying glimpse of the actual lawn, the actual shrubs, the actual curving sidewalk, and especially the actual white pillars gives visual vindication to their claim to be reporting for their network "at the White House...

...It was bad form but, by the commercial measure, good television...

...in the present case, a family sent over by central casting...

...The government officials, by contrast, clear their throats, squirm in the studio chairs, dodge the hectoring questions of the TV interviewers, and find themselves in the middle of a sentence when it is time for a commercial...

...Pierpoint was asked, at a seminar dealing with these matters, why TV doesn't do more investigative reporting he answered, candidly, that the monetary rewards for TV reporters come from being seen there on the screen, not for spending eleven months digging into a story...

...We have samples of what could be: the House Judiciary Committee considering Richard Nixon's impeachment...

...Why would three grown-up networks do that...

...It extends its magic even out across Pennsylvania Avenue into Lafayette Park, as I learned recently in a small encounter of my own...

...Fred Graham and Carl Stern stand before the Supreme Court building, Ike Pappas before the Pentagon, Richard Valeriani in...

...Five hours after I had been somnolently grading undergraduate examinations I found myself sitting in a first-class seat on a TWA flight to Washington, at the initiative and the expense of the ABC network...

...Failing everything else on a news day—and after all news days come around in a dreadfully daily way—there is always something that can be extracted from that one building...

...When one network's correspondent blows his or her lines representatives of the others, waiting with their camera crews, have been known to make remarks unsuitable for family programming...

...It does not take place in a small ring...

...The current system has however this advantage: I can watch those shrubs, and when Lesley Stahl once more appears before them in her lovely fur coat and blue scarf I will know that it is winter...

...The White House is an instantly identifiable building, known to all, and—unlike the Capitol—it has only one principal occupant, also presumably known to all...

...through Republican and Democratic administrations...

...I was then promptly flown back home again, first-class once more, in time to watch myself energetically giving off interpretations for perhaps 45 seconds on ABC's evening news program...

...When Mr...

...The deliberative process of constitutional democracy, however, is not "made for television" if you define television in Roone Arledge's way, which is also the way of American commercial television...

...I was sitting one day in my office in the middle of the country, tending to my slow-paced business, when the telephone rang, and life abruptly accelerated...

...Nevertheless it could be carried superbly on television, if the economic and conceptual foundation of the medium were different—if the requirements as to time, money, size of audience, instant simple drama were altered...

...the Kefauver and Army-McCarthy hearings in the early days of television...

...The shrubs, however, and the curving sidewalk, the grass, and the midsection of the White House pillars remain the same, through sunlight, spring blossoms, rain, frost, sleet, and snow...

...You get in close...

...Sam Donaldson, the interviewer, had complained at breakfast in the Madison Hotel, "We have to do everything so fast," a point with which, digesting my matudinal omelette in this surprising setting, I could not disagree...

...Why does network television favor the presidency...

...the decisive action is usually not as primitive as a sock in the jaw...

...A regular appearance on that White House lawn, and at the presidential press conferences, and on presidential trips, helps to make Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Bob Shieffer, and Lesley Stahl recognizable to the millions upon millions the networks need to attract...

...The viewing public did get to know a group of legislators, and to view them disagreeing with each other, in their own setting, in something like their governmental role...

...it's made for television...

...It's made for television...

...in boxing you have people who are not only not in the kind of big, anonymous uniforms that football players wear, but in fact their body, their faces, almost everything about them is visible, and right there in your living room...

...And the networks do show the lawns, doorways, and fronts of other buildings...

...1 was accompanied on the screen by the park bench, the ABC interviewer the passing cars on Pennsylvania Avenue, and—the whole point of the expensive logistics—the distant white columns in front of the executive mansion...

...We have now this fourth branch of government that makes its decisions on grounds of its own private interest: celebrities, ratings, money...

...The primitive, simple act so easy to understand...

...Reporters covering Congress stand in a parking lot from which the camera can catch a piece of the Capitol dome...

...Dan Rather would not be the eight-million-dollar man had it not been for his visibility as a White House correspondent, including a moment when at a press conference he responded, on television, to the president of the United States, improper retort for improper retort...

...the Ervin Watergate committee on PBS...

...Pierpoint that at about 6:23 Eastern time the three networks often jostle, elbow, and scramble for the best spot on that lawn...

...In the answers to that question you can discern most of the defects of network news, and most of the reasons for one Commonweal: 404 sizable effect it has had on public life, the implicit and unintentional building up of the presidency, at the expense of other institutions...

...through hostage crises, volcanic eruptions, gas lines, and presidential campaigns...

...Donaldson's Law there must be another, of more general application: the larger the audience and the more elaborate and expensive the technique the harder it is to communicate anything worth communicating...

...Sometimes," he said, "it gets pretty hairy...

...For commercial television Congress is like baseball and football, the presidency like boxing: The small ring...

...front of some glass doors at the State Department...

...Commercial network television, defined by the conditions listed above, prefers the White House and the presidency to Congress, the Supreme Court, the cabinet, the great grey bureaucracies, or the complications of state and local government...

...The democratic process is many-sided, complex, and slow...

...The network news itself does move indoors, occasionally, to be sure, and show an established correspondent standing beside a podium with a seal on it...

...WILLIAM LEE MILLER Commonweal: 406...

...Asked whether the networks devote too much of their time and staff to the White House, he replied not only that anything that happens to or is done by the president is news, but also that almost any other event in the world, from a hockey team's victory to an earthquake in Peru, reverberates in some way in the White House...

...When you see a televised piece of the debate in the Canadian parliament you wish that could happen here...

...Now, if Mr...

...You get to know them as people...

...Sometimes the head is that of Robert Pierpoint or Lee Thornton, or if I switch from CBS to NBC it's Judy Woodruff, or on ABC Sam Donaldson...

...In addition this "institution" has the convenient virtue of consisting of just one human person, suitably equipped with quirks, a palace guard, a detailed daily schedule, and relatives...

...Roone Arledge, the head of ABC sports who, without blinking, became the head also of ABC news, said once that the best sport for television is boxing...

...I LIKE to watch the seasons come and go, not, as Wordsworth or Thoreau might do, by actually venturing out-of-doors, where these seasons display a disconcerting variation of temperature, nor by looking out my window, where the changing scene, though pleasant, has no historical pizz-azz, but by looking just behind Lesley Stahl's head at those two shrubs and that patch of grass on the White House lawn...

...Moreover, this occupant is thought to stand at the top and center of the nation and of world politics...

...The latter are familiar figures, visible again and again on that screen, and they are at home on their own turf in their own medium...

...Pierpoint made a couple of revealing remarks that showed why it won't happen here, while the big commercial units define the medium...

...abruptly with one picture of him sitting in his oval office or striding into his press conference or descending the steps of his Air Force One, or even of the front of the mansion inside which he is presumed to be making weighty decisions, one can evoke the drama of world history...

...The wind that blows a reporter's hair, the angle from which a camera shows his jaw, the pillars that can be seen behind the face, and the precise second at which the report comes to an end—these extraneous considerations take on a heavy significance for a medium defined by sight, sound, personality, intense competition, an entertainment context, gargantuan audiences and obscenely valuable moments of time...

...Just when you are ready to shoot the wind will blow...

...Along with Mr...

...the number of players is large...

...the assortment of senators, cabinet members, members of the House of Representatives, prime ministers from other countries, ambassadors to the United Nations, seem much less important, because less well-known and celebrated, than the television people who ask them questions...

...cabinet members and their departments are reduced to pictures of the plaques in front of indistinguishable buildings...