That's entertainment

...My assumption, crude but I would bet scientifically provable, is that most people who feel a need for high office, like most people who feel an irresistible urge to entertain, are not wrapped too tight...

...Hart's fall from — "grace" really shouldn't be the world...

...A longer evening news broadcast would allow the networks to sell expensive time to sponsors, and would give us twice as many stories about pandas, skydiving grandmothers, and lots of reports that end with the line, "Only time will tell...

...This is another drawback of making personal morality a political test...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT PUBLIC SCRUTINY & THE PRESS One of the advantages of the Gary Hart/Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker/ Oliver North thing (it is all basically one thing) is that it allows everyone to spout stuff about morality, the duty of the press, righteousness, being above the law, feeling that the rules don't apply, and so forth...

...a recent story on Marcos's theft of billions is a good example...

...Why he may be that way is the province of the novelist, or of the psychologist...

...Instead, we heard about the front runner falling behind, and about how "the field" looks now...

...So is anyone who insists on a clean bill of moral health, while acting another way...

...Jim and Tammy, ditto...

...Do I begrudge these people their bad taste or naivete...

...Some of the networks complain that local stations will not allow them to expand the evening news to an hour, thus hampering the presumably better job they could do with more time...

...It isn't really the job of the press to be sedate or responsible — no one ever thought the press shared its vocation with Mother Teresa — but rather to let us know damn near everything it can find out about the people who want to lead us and who should, therefore, be regarded with lots of suspicion and skepticism...

...Finding religious hope or consolation in something like the PTL Club is another...

...Their characters are maybe even more fragile than the average sort...

...He has the power to do harm...

...The Hart story is diverting, somewhat scandalous...

...But these are exceptions...

...I don't mind much when the press gives us the bimbo stories, and it is entertaining to watch Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell go at it tooth and nail — but the press has an obligation to give us something more...

...The problem is his image...

...Some journalists, commenting on the Hart case, recalled what they apparently regarded with nostalgia as the good old era of the "gentleman's agreement...

...My major irritation with the media coverage of Gary Hart is that the Miami papers didn't cover the back door at all well...

...I don't blame the local outlets...

...It was more a mood in which Jesus' name was dragged around, used as a form of air-freshener or backlighting, and it somehow made some people feel good to come in contact with it...

...the problem is that it seldom covers anything much more substantial, in any helpful depth...

...As we move toward the election of a man who will be able to make world-ending decisions, we ought to know more about him than his rating in the polls, or how voters who know a little, maybe even less, than reporters do, feel about his image or his morals...

...Most political coverage is commentary on image and appearance, with a nod to how well or badly a politician is playing in the polls...

...An ordinary American newspaper is devoted to this sort of commentary and little else...

...It's all right to be shallow at that level...

...The fact that they can leads me to Oliver North, who would not have had his position of authority without Ronald Reagan, whose opinion-poll ratings are still not as low as they should be...

...19 June 1987: 379...

...and I have no doubt that he is benign, personally, a charming if not very focused man who would not be unpleasant to sit next to during dinner and who obviously loves his wife...

...Peters points out the desire of journalists to seem to be hip and in-the-know, and he sees this as damaging: "Most political reporters are Jack Germonds — wryly witty, world-weary, not know-it-alls in an offensive manner, but finally wanting it to appear that they do know it all...

...CBS, until its recent shake-up, cut back foreign news coverage on the grounds that it bored most Americans...

...The press is, in part, entertainment...

...the willingness to be silent about Jack Kennedy's ruttish behavior was cited, as if this were not really important...

...It isn't the sin of hypocrisy which matters here, but hypocrisy's political dangers...

...The press may not have known every power-groupie's connections, but it should have tried to find out, if it had been sufficiently aware of the need to have a president who is, not beyond reproach, but beyond blackmail...

...And so forth...

...I didn't find his ideas nearly as impressive as he did, but he did in fact have a record worth examining...

...Jack, however, was bedding a Mafia moll...

...wherever it was he fell from reminds me of Mort Sahl's remark about the history of the presidency being a disproof of the history of evolution...

...It is true even of newspapers with better reputations: they offer the higher gossip...

...Or maybe not: who among us is without sin...

...You would never know, reading or watching or listening to most of the sources Americans turn to for news, that the threat of nuclear war has not vanished with its passing as a faddish concern, or that the environment is still in trouble (ecology was a sixties' story...

...but I would feel better if they couldn't vote...

...In the June issue of Washington Monthly, Charles Peters has something to say about this which is right on the mark...

...But that isn't as much to the point as having a president who can't be blackmailed...

...The press is to blame for a lot of this...

...The thin imitation of religion preached by Bakker wasn't even as solid as Jimmy Swaggart's bigoted Pentecos-talism...

...This is no sillier than monarchy, I guess, but unlike Queen Elizabeth, whose presence on earth makes a lot of soap opera fans happy, Reagan is more than a symbol and a drain on the national treasury...

...Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's PTL Club show is one I must confess I have watched with horrid fascination for a few years — not steadily, I hasten to say, and never for long, since only a little of it could cause insulin shock, and prolonged viewing of shows like the PTL Club (or game shows) causes lobotomy-by-erosion...

...PBS's Frontline has offered some fine reporting...

...We have come down to an odd Kennedy imitator, someone who wants to be president, obviously bright but also obviously weird, insisting on how stable he is and daring the press to follow him around, just see if he's a womanizer...

...What should be of concern is not that the press covers Gary Hart's alleged amours, or scandals in the world of sleazy 378: Commonweal evangelists, or shows us too many photos of Fawn Hall...

...So when they do write about them, they write boring synopses of the candidates' platforms — which fulfill the reporters' own prophecies that issues are boring — instead of lively analyses of candidate positions that put into perspective how those positions relate to the major problems of the country and how they don't...

...It's nice, and we want that: grandpa for president...

...I would add that it is not only intellectual insecurity but laziness, because it is a lot easier to talk about images and polls than to do the homework necessary to compare the economic ideas of Michael Dukakis, Bruce Babbitt, and Paul Simon, or to examine a candidate's record...

...His departure leaves room for better people, but some of the questions which were raised by his fall seem to me to be way off the mark...

...It is also (in the Hart case) important to know that someone who might have had his finger so close to the nuclear trigger is also so self-destructive...

...The people who ultimately give us our politics deserve to be better informed, even if they don't particularly like it, even if they don't pay attention...

...What I mean is that if, for example, a presidential candidate were openly gay he could not be blackmailed on that account, and we are a long way from a society in which a gay president could be blackmailed with a threat to reveal the fact that he is a closet heterosexual...

...Gary Hart's final outburst was arrogant and silly, but one thing he said did make sense: no one had bothered to talk about his ideas...

...There are some decent exceptions: Cable News Network is often better than any of the three major networks and seems willing to spend time, occasionally, exploring a story...

...Just as the Hart story is not basically about morality, sd the Jim Bakker story is not really about religion, but entertainment...

...It should be more than that, though...

...Beneath this appearance there is often a truly colossal intellectual insecurity, which helps explain why, instead of covering the issues, they always turn elections into horse races — who's up and who's down in the polls — and into accounts of gaffes and scandals...

...What his ideas are, or what his close advisors believe, matters less to most people than how he makes them feel...

...The press gets to go off on a self-examination binge after the Miami Vice stakeout and decides that it is, by God, doing a good job...

...Maybe political and cultural analysis of the sort we need will bore most people...

...Station owners, for obvious reasons, would rather sell that time to local sponsors, allowing them to offer local news as shallow as the national news, reporters who ask the survivors of tragedies how they feel, and cretinous weather forecasters as irritating as anyone working at the network level...

...But a man who claims to be as straight as the next guy — here's my wife, here are my kids — is blackmailable, if he is in fact gay...

...That he is, is the important political fact, and I suppose it may be called a question of character...

...If they write about issues they just might reveal what they don't know...

...There are some vices I will never understand: foot fetishism, for example, is one of them...

...that's too bad...

...As it has been presented, the Hart/ Bakker/North stuff is entertaining, and the press shouldn't be ashamed when it distracts us from what really matters — the fact of our mortality, how well we live as husbands and wives and parents and friends, wrestling with ego, not being moved to stupid action by the stupid culture which surrounds us...

...Reagan manages to look so benign, even as-he leaves a trail of dead Marines in Lebanon and dead peasants in Central America...

...The question should not be whether a person's "private life" or "personal morality" should be subjected to public scrutiny, and the question of "character" is too vaguely put...