COMMENTS:Campaign Images: Mirrors Within Mirrors
Gitlin, Todd
It is an appalling visitation. You turn on the television and watch the president of the United States. He delivers his right-thinking homilies, fudges his ignorance, composes his...
...A study of TV campaign coverage in 1980 showed that roughly two-thirds of the nightly network news stories emphasized the horse race: who was ahead, who behind, who thought to be gaining...
...Following footage of Reagan setting forth each of his claims, NBC reporter Carl Stern juxtaposed a hard fact that refuted it...
...This, partly, is runofthe-mill image management and partly, perhaps, a fear that if the networks incur too much presidential wrath they'll suffer in the giveaway sweepstakes now taking place in Washington under the heading "deregulation...
...Since his days in the California State House Reagan has been adept at glad-handing the press and giving them what they want: quotable lines, good profiles, "photo opportunities" (the secular equivalents of papal audiences en masse), and the feeling of being taken seriously, let in on glamor, ease, uplift, and camaraderie...
...Again, the normal memory hole, the press of later-breaking news, the media's normal reliance on official sources...
...about one-sixth emphasized the positions taken by candidates...
...In this situation, candidates do not so much take positions as "position themselves," and mirrors flash into mirrors...
...And, above all, they feel bound to revere the office of The Presidency...
...Positions do not get clarified for substantial debate...
...The pageantry serves the interest of evasion...
...You know me," was Mondale's refrain against his less experienced opponents...
...it may take the curious form of singling out the president's manner for more comment than his matter...
...The candidates make their own images, to paraphrase Marx, but not in conditions of their own making...
...Image is real when voters make real choices on the basis of little knowledge besides image...
...The New Yorker ingeniously traced Reagan's practical sidestep to his origins as a radio announcer...
...If television is more easily conned than the print media, the difference is one of degree, not kind...
...Reagan claimed wonders for the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, for example, and Stern showed that enforcement funds had been slashed...
...Daily journalism, a memory hole, paid no attention...
...flaws in the official story about Korean Air Lines 007 surfaced only piecemeal and slowly...
...The sitting president— the only president we have, as Lyndon B. Johnson used to say—gets the benefit of the doubt...
...The primary campaign lasted long enough to show each of them to disadvantage...
...The White House is not delighted when an occasional network piece undercuts official claims with a strong fact...
...But their smugness complements the candidates' own, and so no easy rectification is in sight...
...At a certain point, the difference between candidate and concocted image becomes purely formal...
...The hapless Carter tried to make an issue of Reagan's militarist proclivities, only to get labeled as "strident...
...Color commentary," as they call it during the ball game, is the better part of tribute...
...Even gestures like the cock of his head are just the right size for the close-up...
...than "Who benefits...
...And so Reagan as host is perfectly perched to exploit television, the medium that magnifies the telling gesture, the composed demeanor, the small witticism...
...But the news media, with television in the lead, treat us as observers of our own political fate, not as makers of it...
...Everyone can become an armchair tactician...
...Ronald Reagan takes note that the Marines were killed in Lebanon...
...It does not want to remind the Republic that it has delivered itself over to a demagogic true believer whose occasional self-deprecation is his only saving grace—and his greatest realism...
...His sheltered, cramped view of the world is no longer the point...
...In other words, the media's obsequiousness follows from their sensitivity to what they think is their role...
...First, a small but salient matter of personality: many reporters hated Carter, who froze them out, preached at them, and didn't make them feel like honored guests in the entourage...
...Perhaps he was, although I suppose another observer might have called him "passionate...
...Dan Rather has defended this preoccupation with standings by claiming that people are "interested" in the horse race...
...The announcer or host isn't in charge...
...The meaning of this situation is not to be found in the old vocabulary of manipulation, demagoguery, charisma, because it is not altogether clear who, if anyone, is in charge...
...To be a silver-tongued orator was sufficient and appropriate in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan swept 400 the Democratic convention...
...Commentary about his skill as a "communicator" or his tactics is in order...
...Why...
...Shut out, most TV reporters let the insurgent candidate off the hook...
...And then, of course, the candidates' capacity to mobilize national followings helps keep the party structures weak...
...As if this were a self-evident recommendation...
...Teflon, the man to whom blame does not stick...
...The very standards are dissolving, since the media's residual sense of responsibility to flush out the candidates' views is drowned out by their need for a "story" that dramatizes conflict and characters...
...But, of course, the Mondale that the electorate knows is a canned Mondale, and 402 what we see is what we are permitted to see by the collaboration of candidates and media...
...Thus the irony: candidates like Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson, whose careers are inconceivable but for their command of the media, come to feel hurt by the scrutiny of those self-same channels of exposure...
...nothing new about that...
...treat them as citizens, needing to come to informed judgments, and they might just act that way...
...I F THE PRESIDENT has come off brightly, the Democratic candidates for the nomination have come off as lesser lights...
...He delivers his right-thinking homilies, fudges his ignorance, composes his chuckles, strains to summon a fact or two from failing memory banks stuffed a few hours earlier in a quick cram course...
...It has to be added, in Mondale's behalf, that he got more media mileage out of his one-liners than his more complicated statements—sentences too long for TV news clips...
...He does not control, his manner would have us believe...
...Phrase-making and face-making are rewarded when the candidates think they can get mileage out of them...
...The press likes to be taken for a ride because prefabricated excitement is its bread and butter...
...Some in the media, having helped elevate Hart to a close second, now decided to show who was boss...
...But there is more to it than that...
...The candidates cater: this is their defining work in a mass society that is formally democratic, with parties that aren't organized ideologically...
...Glenn's star faded, Hart did well in Iowa and New Hampshire, and presto, the "story" was now that Hart had "defied expectations...
...Me blow up oil tanks and fishing boats in Nicaragua...
...It has been pointed out (by Steven R. Weisman in the New York Times Magazine and the anonymous chroniclers of the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town") that Reagan's genius, if that is the right word, has been his capacity to sidestep responsibility...
...Americans live in the future," he said once, expressing an important half-truth about the cocky archetypical American, ever ready to blunder into the swamps of war because (unless the politicians get in the generals' way) We Can't Lose...
...For all these reasons, once in office Reagan has been able to capitalize on the same fine image that gave him the appearance of a landslide with 51 percent of the 1980 popular vote...
...One of the top political TV reporters in San Francisco gave me exactly the same argument...
...Little old me send Marines to Lebanon and Grenada...
...TECHNOLOGY ASIDE, there are several reasons why Reagan got off relatively easy in the 1980 campaign...
...Collaborating with the machinery of imagemaking, as he has done all his adult life, the president "sounds good" and "looks good," so we say...
...The media, uninterested in analyzing dull "positions," focused on the aura of "new ideas," and set him up for Mondale's muchrepeated query, "Where's the beef...
...To project a comforting radio presence was excellent in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, when TV cameras might have caught FDR constantly on crutches or in a wheelchair and hurt him severely...
...and although some other reporters thought Mudd had gone too far, Hart was quickly stripped of the mantle of innocence he'd so recently acquired...
...But this match between technology and talent is only the beginning of his mastery of the medium...
...True—and leftwing paranoia misses this point—there has been sufficient media criticism to draw administration annoyance...
...In the delicate legitimacy game that the top American institutions are playing, even the image movers, shakers, and breakers are image-conscious...
...When so much hangs on the electorate's choice, you might think that the media could find a higher responsibility...
...I doubt that this year's figures will turn out differently...
...If the media question policies at all, they are likely to do so on the ground of efficacy, not of objective...
...Whether calling plays on the field or, later on, introducing the General Electric Theater on television, Reagan was host...
...They fear shaking public confidence in their own credentials...
...The upshot is that since Ronald Reagan is president of the United States, the media assume he is entitled to a kind of respect that borders on tribute...
...In any event, this pseudo-democratic defense of the status quo amounts to an entertainment view of the world: "give 'em what they want," as if it's always clear "what they want"—as if the sheer weight of what's available didn't shape people's sense of what it's possible to want, as if people weren't ambivalent...
...They aim to keep the audience entertained, and attention spans are short...
...Respect for the White House view of the situation is not simply utilitarian...
...Newspaper reporters did no better...
...They are far more likely to ask, "Does it work...
...he's just pointing out what's going on out there, somewhere else...
...But more: the media know that, for example, many more people supported Reagan's military censorship in Grenada than their own First Amendment rights...
...Never mind that for several previous years Reagan had blared forth his homespun rightism in hundreds of columns and broadcasts...
...Knowing reporters are matched by knowing citizens, handicappers all, whose involvement is vicarious...
...If the media must keep a president spotlit, their task vis-a-vis challengers is, above all, to maintain a sense of the excitement of the race...
...But Carter's vehemence played badly, like his too huge, too strained grin...
...What you see is what you get...
...The implied objects of all this hoopla are the seat-warmers at the spectacle, flattered as sovereigns only to be patronized as consumers...
...Nice Guy cried foul and let the nasty words slide right off...
...Those who live by the spotlight can die by it...
...In the end, the striking thing is the discrepancy, the bad fit, between the campaign—its glitter, gloss, and slapdash quality—and the awesome magnitude of presidential power...
...A little later John Glenn had his moment of glory, partly because The Right Stuff was good media fodder...
...How does Dan Rather know what people are "interested" in, or what they might be "interested" in if it were presented to them coherently and engagingly enough...
...With few exceptions, they sonorously take at face value the claims of this man whose sense of the real is so fundamentally damaged...
...The pointless massacre of the Marines in Lebanon faded fast...
...Under these conditions, tribute is not necessarily 401 agreement...
...Mondale's attack on Hart in Chicago for being, in effect, soft on communism was instantly relayed everywhere else, discrediting him with the left wing of the Democratic electorate...
...After he announced that trees cause pollution, and this along with other such remarks went around the world, Reagan's staff decided to keep him away from reporters...
...on the lecture platform, they'd be lost...
...Announcers, reporters, pundits take all this seriously...
...And if the Great Communicator is threadbare...
...he presides...
...403...
...too harsh toward him...
...Hart, overconfident, seems to have started believing his press notices, and his "gaffes," amplified by the media, helped slow his momentum in Illinois...
...The images they flash can get out of their control...
...It would be mean-spirited to say so...
...And more, or worse: The press believes in the essential political order...
...The members of the fourth estate are keenly aware that Reagan is more popular, as the polls show, than they are...
...It wants stability...
...The media weren't much interested, because the "story" then was that Mondale was way ahead of the pack...
...Carter didn't know what soap opera actors learn: the gesture that projects well to the far balcony on Broadway looks garish on the small screen...
...and "Is this a fit goal...
...Second, the more or less liberal Democrats among them were bending over backward to be kind—"fair"—to Reagan...
...All seems image, which is the mass democratic equivalent of vanity...
...On so-called Super Tuesday (politics again as a sporting event), Roger Mudd bashed Hart around on NBC—"Will you show us your Teddy Kennedy imitation...
...it is an article of belief...
...Thus, unintendedly, the media's exercises in demystification contribute to a higher-order mystification...
...The media of the time create the screen on which the image has to be projected...
...The curious career of Gary Hart's image illustrates the point...
...He is Mr...
...The candidates' televised debates are a partial exception but even here, the format is generally so slick that a clever tactic—like Reagan's 1980 "There you go again" to Carter—can prove enormously influential...
...IN THE END, however dizzying and distracting this process of image-making, the media, like magnifying glasses in the sun, concentrate but do not invent...
...TV patter in politics sounds like, and draws its model from, sports talk...
...Ronald Reagan Presents the United States of America...
...and so on...
...Having gotten nowhere with actual positions, Hart decided to project the image of "new ideas," and he got good copy with it...
...Once his geniality was established, reporters and their editors were fearful of seeming (image, again...
...Reagan does seem to be as perfect a television president as Jimmy Carter was a hapless one...
...But it is also true that, once having observed that Reagan slides away from hard questioning, reporters usually give up easily...
...The major beneficiary of all this is probably cynicism: the knowing audience—clued in to the candidates' off-screen maneuvers, made privy to the candidates' stratagems and ratings—becomes adept at following the great shell game...
...The point, it seems, is that Reagan embodies that dreamland America perpetually on its way onward and upward, radiating assurance and the upbeat, mirroring back to America its glorious founding premise—that the power of the will is going to conquer the unruly tangle of the wilderness...
...On at least one occasion, his press secretary, Lyn Nofziger, resorted to holding a clipboard in front of a TV camera to keep it from intruding where it wasn't wanted...
...Ideas of civic virtue are submerged in the interest of the ideology of consumer choice...
...Treat people as connoisseurs of the standings in the horse race, and they become consumers of politics...
...There is yet another reason for the supine acceptance of Ronald Reagan by the press...
...For a year before the primaries, Hart was talking up positions...
...The media's attitude is not quite cynicism, which requires a base line of standards capable of being deformed or neglected...
...Gary Hart's crack about New Jersey as an inferior place to campaign, uttered in Los Angeles in late May, was instantly relayed to Newark...
...Those who argue from audience "likings" may, of course, be right, or wrong, or the point may be simply self-fulfilling...
...Old news is a position the candidate wants us to forget about, and the reporters were glad to comply...
...Reporters defined his "warmonger" charges as extreme, and Mr...
...To the extent that the parties are weak, the candidates' personal aura takes on an unwarranted importance...
...I happened to catch one such NBC piece last spring: Reagan gave a speech reciting what he had presumably done for women...
...It seems perfectly obvious that a candidate has to "look good," whatever that means, on television, to win either the nomination or the presidency...
...Debategate was a dead issue until a judge resurrected it...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
