Media

...As it happened this shooting was not, and did not become, the kind of crisis it might have been...

...From that necessity come the artificial emphases upon speed, brevity, celebrity, the visual, the dramatic, and on making things interesting...

...Last November NBC, with its new methods of projecting results from exit polls, colored its map blue (for Reagan) hours before the polls had closed on the West Coast, causing citizens there to feel that their vote was useless, and damaging the prospects of some local candidates...

...At the Democratic convention last summer the networks kept making a great deal of Ted Kennedy, and of rumors of Ted Kennedy, even when there wasn't much to be made...

...Nothing is happening...

...how grateful they were at NBC for Ed Murrow over at CBS...

...Details after this message...

...Glockenspeigle: No...

...took on a life of its own...

...Sir, will you tell CBS News why you are leaving...

...But for all that, TV news has the flaws that stem from its commercial base...

...On never being boring...

...From the point-of-view of the civic life of a democracy it is a screwy system...

...A citizen who watches a half hour of CBS or NBC nightly news, and the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, has a pretty good exposure to public affairs...

...The then head of NBC News told me twenty-five years ago, just when'a fellow,named Chet Huntley had come to join another named David Brinkley to make a new NBC News...

...A joke in one of the media books puts it: "The World Comes to an End Tonight...

...CBS News has just learned that the sky is falling...

...And the commercial base intruded in an explicit way...

...Usually it doesn't...

...that the president had not been hit...

...WILLIAM LEE MILLER...

...We have Senator Makeshift from Arkansas here with us...

...Senator Glockenspeigle, is anything happening...

...We have a startling new development at the podium...

...Like the rest of big television it must seek to hold the attention of a ridiculously big and polyglot audience in competition with other programs trying to steal that attention...

...Governor Little: Well I was coming out of this place called the Red Onion and I'd had a couple of these drinks they called the Wheero and something hit me on the head and I guess I did say something and some of the delegates from Idaho heard me...

...Morton: Yes Walter, CBS News has just learned that there's a report circulating among the delegates that the sky is falling...

...We have the source of the story here with us, Governor Little of Idaho...

...reached its zenith when the local news reported as hard fact that the Republican ticket would be Reagan and Ford...

...WILLIAM LEE MILLERys...

...Governor Chicken Little, tell us what happened...

...It is more unequivocally so when you add public television...

...The NBC News division could use the standards that Murrow had established, and the place that he had carved out within that competitive network, as a lever within their own...

...Suppose it had...

...The emphasis on speed, on a scoop, on being first-carried over in part from the heritage of newspaper journalism-has new dimensions with the rapidity of the electronic media, as election night coverage by the networks shows...

...The networks have such high stakes in the time that they're taking to cover these things-every minute and every point in the ratings is worth millions-that they pretend something is happening, or make something happen, even if it isn't...

...That was a funny column, but I don't think that's the way it works...

...The networks, stuck with an institutional emphasis upon speedy reporting, were caught in serious errors on the day that President Reagan was shot...

...grew...

...On never letting anything go on very long lest the audience's hand begin to itch for the knob...

...In a limited way the competition can sometimes be good...

...We go now to Bruce Morton at the podium for more on this story...

...At the Republican convention the story that Gerald Ford would be the vice-presidential candidate started with a Cronkite interview with Ford...

...It's really more like this: Cronkite: We interrupt the vice-president's speech to bring you a startling news report...

...Stahl: Bruce, we've been talking with Governor, Brown and with several delegates from California, and they say that nothing at all is happening...

...Morton: Walter, I have Senator Glockenspeigle from New Jersey here...

...Senator: Somebody in the Idaho delegation told me...

...Cronkite: The party platform is being presented at the podium, but we're going to follow this fast-breaking falling sky story...

...Come in, Bruce Morton...

...I was reminded when I read this that the first news of the shooting of Robert Kennedy, in June of 1968, was followed by an advertisement extolling the smoothness of Newport cigarettes...

...On the whole, when you consider the medium within which it functions and the condition of the public's awareness before it arrived on the scene, the national network news is a positive achievement...

...Delegate: I'm getting out of here...

...We heard on the TV about the falling sky, and one of our delegates said something hit her on the head, too...

...Morton: Now over to Leslie Stahl, with the California delegation, who reports that nothing's happening there either...

...And often in big events and crises television distinguished itself beyond the level of the nightly news...

...Reporter: This is Judy Woodruff at the Hotel Kitsch in downtown convention city, where CBS News has just learned that six delegations are packing up and leaving...

...We go now to Bruce Morton for more on this story...

...and then burst . . . all as part of a media story...

...The most widely used means of communication about public affairs is an appendage to a mass entertainment medium...

...Art Buchwald wrote a funny column which I paraphrase from memory: Walter Cronkite: CBS News has just learned that nothing is happening on the floor...

...Cronkite: Tonight at seven, ten central time, CBS News will present a special report on this remarkable story, The Day the Sky Didn't Fall...

...Now back to you in the booth, Walter...

...In the way that announcers on sporting events keep telling you what an exciting game it is, even if it's not, so is it also with the news...

...Various networks erroneously reported that James Brady was dead...

...According to Tom Shales of the Washington Post, when CBS News took a local break at 3:25 on that Monday afternoon the Washington CBS affiliate ran two jolly commercials, "Hi ho Pimlico" and "Kenny Rogers's greatest hits...

...Suppose the networks had given the nation falsehoods as serious as these...

...In that unusual case, ironically, the competition among the networks made the outcome better...

...And that's the way it is on this exciting news day at convention city...

...There was an illuminating moment when one of the alleged sources for that story, Governor James Thompson of Illinois, turned to the television interviewer and said: "I heard it all from you guys...

...The networks keep coming up with new ways to project winners and declare states to have been carried by particular candidates earlier than their rivals do, almost (it seems now) the instant anybody anywhere votes...

...That entertainment, in its turn, is presented not in its own right but as a means of attracting viewers for commercial purposes...

...Defects that follow from this odd arrangement are regularly evident in the news coverage-for example, in events of the last year (since I started writing these pieces) like the party conventions, the elections, the hostage crisis, the shooting of the president, and-a symbol of one point-an "event" our present news system itself created-the replacement of Cron-kite by Dan Rather...

...Morton: Walter, CBS News has just learned that the sky is npt falling...

...Media THE FALLING SKY STORY BACK TO YOU, WALTER ' THE COVERAGE of news and public affairs on American television is something of a victory of moral man over immoral society: of some service to a value beyond the scramble for money within an institution devoted to the latter...

...Last summer the networks were stuck with a commitment to cover conventions which by their criteria (false criteria, by the standard of the civic good) were not really newsworthy, since the outcomes were settled...

...and that the president had had open heart surgery...

...In that case to an extreme, and in the hostage crisis to a lesser extent and in a different way, TV news showed its magnetic attraction to "people," to personality, to ' 'human interest," in a way that distorts the true proportions of civic affairs...

...Senator Makeshift where did you hear this report...

...But that scramble-the competitive struggle for ridiculously big audiences-has its effect, even on the news...