Blips, Bites & Savvy Talk
Gitlin, Todd
In the pilot film for the 1987 television series Max Headroom, an investigative reporter discovers that an advertiser is compressing television commercials into almost instantaneous "blipverts,"...
...But ignorance is sometimes a defense against powerlessness...
...The time of the professional media consultant had arrived...
...Average turnout from 1824 to 1836 was 48 percent of eligible voters...
...During that same period, in the 18 to 29 age group, the number of "everyday readers" dropped by more than half, from 60% to 29...
...they approved of social science...
...In 1884 a Protestant minister called the Democrats the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" as the Republican James G. Blaine stood by without demurral— which may well have cost Blaine the election...
...They invite and cultivate an inside dopester's attitude toward politics— vicarious fascination coupled with knowing indifference...
...In the same way, the postmodern savviness of political coverage—whether in the glib version of a Bruce Morton or the more sedate version of MacNeil/Lehrer—binds its audience closer to an eerie politics of halftruth, deceit, and evasion in which ignorant symbols clash by night...
...Roosevelt campaigned for a balanced budget...
...The parties became gradually more redundant...
...As the pundits and correspondents pontificate in their savvy way, they take part in a circular conversation—while an attuned audience, wishing to be taken behind the scenes, is invited to inspect the strategies of the insiders, whether via the chilly cynicism of a Bruce Morton or the college-try bravado of a Sam Donaldson...
...As befit the new and sometimes dizzying self-consciousness, reporters sometimes displayed, even in public, a certain awareness that they were players in a game not of their own scripting...
...Their stance is an insouciant subservience...
...Politics, by these lights, remains a business for insiders and professionals...
...It was very tough, and I was very nervous about going back to the White House the next day, Sam [she is talking to fellow panelist Sam Donaldson], because I thought they'd never return my phone calls and they'd keep returning yours...
...How good were the good old days...
...To recoup their losses, newspapers are trying to woo the young with celebrity profiles, fitness features, household tips...
...The 1980s began with one of these: the blindfolded American featured on the long-running melodrama called "America Held Hostage," sixty-three weeks of it during 1979-81, running on ABC at 11:30 five nights a week, propounding an image of America as a "pitiful helpless giant" (in Richard Nixon's phrase...
...Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," the leading slogan of 1840, does not exactly constitute a Lincoln-Douglas debate...
...It transmutes the desire to participate into spectacle...
...We don't know, in fact, that "the picture always overrides what you say...
...Future apparatchiks of the mediapolitics nexus are assuming it: the politicians, the Deavers, the publishers of USA Today and its legion of imitators...
...In any case] he is politically cosmopolitan...
...American television has long been compressing politics into chunks, ten-second "bites," and images that freeze into icons as they repeat across millions of screens and newspapers...
...The 1980s were saturated with these memorialized moments...
...Miller argues that television advertising has learned to profess its power by apparently mocking it, standing aside from vulgar claims, assuring the viewer that all of us knowing types are too smart to be taken in by advertising, or gaucherie or passion of any kind...
...What is particular to television...
...there were campaign clubs and marching groups...
...In that watershed year, professional management made its appearance, and both candidates threw themselves into a whirl of public activity...
...Papers accused Jackson's previously divorced wife of having moved in with him while still married to her first husband...
...By 1988 the fact that the horse race had become the principal "story" was itself "old news...
...marveled that earnest student of modern techniques, Theodore Roosevelt...
...at the least they have become acutely self-conscious about their manipulability...
...The big questions of the campaign, in poll and story, are Who's ahead...
...Think of Star Wars animation and Oliver North saluting...
...Dukakis handlers even made a commercial about Bush handlers wringing their hands about how to handle Dan Quayle, a commercial that went over far better with hip connoisseurs than with the unhip rest of the audience who had trouble tracing the commercial to Dukakis...
...They can't...
...and to spin off into fantasies about images...
...This is a success culture bedazzled by sports statistics and empty of criteria other than numbers to answer the question, "How am I doing...
...So handicapping coverage was a defensive maneuver, and a self-flattering one: the media could in this way show that they were immune from the ministrations of campaign professionals...
...Television did not invent the superficiality, triviality, and treachery of American politics...
...For eight years we heard endlessly, from reporters rushing about with spray cans of Teflon, about the mysterious personal qualities of the Great Communicator-in-Chief...
...Can it be simple coincidence that as voting and newspaper reading plummeted in the 1980s, Morton Downey, Jr...
...arrived with his electronic barroom brawl, and talk radio shows proved able to mobilize the indignant against congressional salary raises...
...Here, for example, is ABC's Brit Hume narrating the appearance of George Bush at a flag factory on September 20, 1988: "Bush aides deny he came here to wrap himself in the flag, but if that wasn't the point of this visit, what was it...
...The White House and the television-led press have been scrambling for relative advantage since the Kennedy administration...
...Today, both advertising and political coverage flourish on, and suffer from, what Mark Crispin Miller has called "the hipness unto death...
...I have tried to show that there is precedent for a shriveled politics of slogans, deceit, and pageantry...
...Of all age groups, the young are also the least likely to read newspapers and to vote...
...Perhaps, too, there was a fourth piece—the backstage drama in which the White House made a point of showing Leslie Stahl her place...
...Although the pressure for "great pictures" doesn't apply, at least in the establishment press, the print people are unwilling to cede the "playlets" to television...
...Speaking up is less important— certainly less fun—than sizing up...
...I criticized the horse-race coverage of the primaries...
...The script for the Teheran playlet was not written by the Reagan handlers (although it is possible that they promised weapons to Iran's Revolutionary Guards in exchange for their keeping the hostages until election day), but they certainly knew how it would end...
...And the future...
...And not just for the campaign...
...This was the campaign that made "sound bite," "spin control," "spin doctor," and "handler" into household phrases...
...The talk show hosts did not mobilize against a tax "reform" that lined the pockets of the corporate rich...
...Does a fascination with speed, quick cuts, tensecond bites, one-second "scenes," and outofcontext images suggest less tolerance for the rigors of serious argument and the tedium of modern political life...
...Indeed, the journalists I want to thank Jon Cruz, Daniel C. Hallin, David Riesman, Jay Rosen, Ruth Rosen, and Cynthia Samuels for their comments on an earlier version...
...A half century later, in 1896, Mark Hanna, McKinley's chief handler, was the first campaign manager to be celebrated in his own right...
...Television may not have eroded all possibilities for democratic political life, but it has certainly not thrown open the doors to broad-based enlightenment...
...As long as the agenda is set by the White House, or the campaign, the watchdog is defanged...
...But pending research, one still feels entitled to the pessimism that one must then work to forget...
...Curiously, the famous cynicism of journalists does not keep them from being gullible...
...Why get worked up...
...Think of Ronald Reagan at the Korean DMZ, wearing a flak jacket, field glasses, keeping an eye on the North Korean Communists...
...in 1982, only 30 percent knew that Ronald Reagan opposed the nuclear freeze...
...This muo: be humiliating for any reporter so old-fashioned as to want to take the measure of images against realities...
...Neither know-it-alls nor knownothings are likely to rise to the occasion...
...Once elected president, Andrew Jackson set to wiping out Indian tribes—but this was not an issue in the campaign that elected him, any more than the New Deal was an issue in the campaign that elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1932...
...The vacuum of public discourse is filled on the cheap...
...Above all else, though, the powers of the new media made it necessary for candidates and parties to manage them...
...Are the blip and the bite new...
...It was the anti-American blindfold that disfigured him...
...metacoverage was the press's attempt to recoup some losses...
...Deaver, the public relations man, knows that the surest way to make a reporter complicit is to treat her as an insider...
...A documentary newsreel spliced together at the last minute to counter a Dewey effort probably helped Truman squeak through in 1948...
...Nixon, the first president from southern California, moved advertising and public relations people into his high command...
...A critical audience got her point— Reagan was a hypocrite...
...Has the attention span been shrinking...
...Is negative campaigning new...
...it was the year of the negative commercial, the bite, the clip, the image-blip...
...And inside dopesters got still another point—Reagan, master performer, was impervious to quarrelsome voiceovers...
...for the know-nothing...
...We know how adept Reagan was at performing his playlets—he'd been doing them all his life...
...That year, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Packaging the Presidency, followers of William Henry "Tippecanoe" Harrison carried log cabins in parades, circulated log cabin bandanas and banners, gave away log cabin pins, and sang log cabin songs, all meant to evoke the humble origins of their candidate— although Harrison had been born to prosperity and had lived only briefly in a log cabin...
...This is the famous Brechtian "alienation effect" but with a difference: Brecht thought that actors, by standing outside and "presenting" their characters, could lay bare social relations and show that life could be changed...
...These rituals exhibited the insouciant side of insouciant subservience—reporters dancing attendance at the campaign ball while insisting that they were actually following their own beat...
...Possibly the Dukakis handlers had learned from Mondale's blunder in turning a 1984 debate lighting decision over to Reagan's more skilled people, leaving Mondale showing rings under his eyes—so Michael Deaver told Mark Hertsgaard, as reported in Hertsgaard's On Bended Knee...
...that they could be had, and were actively being had, by savvy handlers...
...The possibility that WINTER • 1990 • 25 Moro in an Ago of Mom rapid pacing may produce effects over longer exposure has not been examined," reads one typical hedge...
...I said, "Didn't you hear what I said...
...While telling Stahl that she's been had, the White House knows that, given her understanding of her job, she's going to be coming back for more stories...
...The way is already open to our contemporary bifurcation: the New York Times and the New York Post...
...The question I want to raise is whether chunk news has caused democratic politics to explode...
...and that they were tired of being had...
...Savviness is the tribute a spectacular culture pays to the pleasures of democracy...
...On this score, the statistics are bad enough...
...the face of Willie Horton...
...Thus, voiceovers explained knowingly that the candidate was going to a flag factory or driving a tank in order to score public relations points...
...According to a 1979 poll, only 30 percent of Americans responding could identify the two countries involved in the SALT II talks then going on...
...and the low-minded sensational paper with its lurid tone, cultivating antipolitical passion...
...The radio hookups of the 1920s made the campaigns still more national, made it possible for candidates and presidents to reach over the heads of the party apparatus directly to the electorate...
...In this ceremony of innocence violated, the moment arose to efface the national brooding over Vietnam...
...What developed in the 1870s and 1880s, with a push from so-called "educated men," was a didactic politics, what McGerr calls an "elitist" politics...
...It might well be, then, that Leslie Stahl's 1984 piece, like many others, was really three WINTER • 1990 • 21 Culture in an Ago of Money pieces...
...How are they positioning themselves for the next play...
...Campaign coverage in 1988 reveled in this mode...
...draw the information about Hanna from an important book by Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928...
...But consider first the coverage itself...
...Not that all mud sticks...
...While 26.6 percent of Los Angeles Times readers are aged 18 to 29, 36.2 percent of USA Today readers are that age...
...Indeed, in this setting, cynicism and gullibility are two sides of the same con...
...Morton Downey, Jr...
...And with popular mobilization came high voter turnout—up to 84 percent of the eligible (all-male) electorate in 1896 and 1900 before it slid to 75 percent during the years 1900-16 and 58 percent in 1920-24...
...While the political class jockeys, the rest of us become voyeurs of our political fate—or enrages...
...George Bush touring the garbage of Boston Harbor (leaving aside that some of the spot was shot elsewhere...
...An aspirin commercial dizzyingly toys with itself ("I'm not a doctor, though I play one on TV," says a soap opera actor...
...Jackson was said to be the offspring of a prostitute's marriage to a mulatto...
...This is an observation only a fool would deny...
...When his hour came round again in 1968, the new Nixon had learned to use—and submit to—the professional image managers...
...David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times writes (March 15, 1989): In 1967, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 73% of the people polled said they read a newspaper every day...
...Haven't you people figured out yet that the picture always overrides what you say?' " The 1988 answer was, apparently not...
...In 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson charged that John Quincy Adams had slept with his wife before marrying her, and that, while minister to Russia, he had supplied the Czar with a young American mistress...
...Coverage of the horse race and metacoverage of the handicappers both suit the discourse of savviness...
...T.G.] But my phone rang, and it was a White House official [presumably Michael Deaver, the propagandist-in-chief], and he said, "Great piece, Leslie...
...emphasis on the national campaign, not community events...
...Journalists compete, news organizations compete—the channeled aggression of the race is what makes their blood run...
...Independent journalism helped—newspapers no longer under party management...
...The widespread publicity placed the emphasis on television's harmlessness...
...Those were the months when Walter Cronkite signed off at CBS night after night by ticking off "the umpty-umpth day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran...
...Anxiety lay behind this new style—anxiety that Reagan really had pulled the Teflon over their eyes, that they had been suckered by the smoothly whirring machinery of his stagecraft...
...Viewers were invited to be cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement...
...It was a morning show that discovered that the Bush and Dukakis campaigns had hired the same Hollywood lighting professionals to illuminate their rallies...
...Hanna "has advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine...
...an Isuzu commercial bids for trust by using subtitles to expose the lies of the overenthusiastic pitchman...
...An American Tradition How new is the reduction of political discourse to the horse race, the handicapping, the tailoring of campaigns to the concoction of imagery...
...Why bother knowing if there's nothing you know how to do about what you know...
...But precedent is nothing to be complacent about when ignorance is the product...
...Or he may see all political issues in terms of being able to get some insider on the telephone...
...The popularity of unexamined military and sports metaphors like "campaign" and "race" shows how deep the addiction runs...
...The handlers count on the gullible side when they gamble that cameras, to paraphrase the ex-president's masterful slip on the subject of facts, are stupid things...
...But the mighty Wurlitzer of the media was primed for a figure who knew how to play upon it...
...As the spectacle becomes more scripted and routine—the nominating conventions are the obvious example— more of the audience turns off...
...How can racing addicts be chased away from the track...
...In turn, pro-Adams newspapers accused Jackson of adultery, gambling, cockfighting, bigamy, slave-trading, drunkenness, theft, lying, and murder...
...In theory, these chunks are television's distinct forte: the emotion-laden image in which an entire narrative is instantly present—Willie Horton, the flag, Bush with his granddaughter...
...So is reduction and spectacle—and high-minded revulsion against both...
...As the artist Folon says, "I work at forgetting I'm a pessimist...
...One is already participating, in effect, by watching...
...Tempting as it is to assume that television has corrupted a previously virginal politics, the beginning of wisdom is history...
...For to probe too much or too far into issues, to show too much initiative in stating the public problems, would be seen by the news business as hubris, a violation of their unwritten agreement to let the candidates set the public agenda...
...Possibly that is true for some audiences, at some times, in some places, and not for others...
...Ronald Lembo's research suggests that younger viewers are more likely, when they watch television, to pay attention to disconnected images...
...q 26 • DISSENT...
...Then blip-centered television floods the audience with images that compress and evoke an entire narrative...
...Can This Generation Be Saved...
...The sense of history as a collage reaches some sort of twilight of the idols when we think of the 1988 election...
...According to the most relentless of studies as well as the evidence of the senses, the main mode of campaign journalism is the horse-race story...
...In the age of professionalization, reformers recoiled...
...The pattern seems set for the 1980s: metacoverage for the cognoscenti, spurious pageantry for the majority...
...Too Hip for Words But to make sense of metacoverage I want to look at the dominant form of political consciousness in a formally open but fundamentally depoliticized society, which is savviness...
...voting was the consolidation of a communal ritual, not an isolated act by which the isolated citizen expressed piety...
...That is why the Reagan staffers were proud of their public relations triumphs...
...In 1988, the Department of Education published a report—a summary of research hither and you—on television's influence on cognitive development...
...But this time horse-race coverage was joined by handicapping coverage—stories about campaign tactics, what the handlers were up to, how the reporters felt about being handled: in short, How are the candidates trying to do it to us, and how are they doing at it...
...Nobody heard what you said...
...Arthur Sulzberger and Rupert Murdoch...
...Stahl's story reveals that the only alternative to complicity would be the damn-it-all spirit of an outsider indifferent to whether the handlers will favor her with scoop-worthy tidbits of information the next time...
...And he said, "We loved it, we loved it, we loved it...
...In the absence of a vital polis, they take polls...
...Now it could be seen that the Vietnam trauma had eclipsed the larger truth: it was the anti-Americans who were ugly...
...After 1960, when Kennedy beat a sweating, five-o'clock-shadowed Nixon among those who watched the debate while losing among those who heard it on the radio, the handwriting was on the screen...
...Gorbachev at the center, shaking hands with the stern-faced Bush...
...But only with television and the proliferation of primaries did media management become central and routine to political campaigns...
...Professionally concocted newsreels played a part in the defeat of Upton Sinclair's 1934 "End Poverty in California" gubernatorial campaign...
...Infotainment" is in the American grain...
...If the players evade an issue, the savvy spectator knows enough to lose interest in it as well...
...paradoxically, campaign metacoverage, by laying bare the campaign's tactics and inside doings, demonstrates only that the campaign is a juggernaut that cannot be diverted...
...Although it took decades for this process to develop, and there were exceptional periods of working-class mobilization along the way, the lineaments of the modern campaign were already in place at the turn of the century: emphasis on the personality of the candidate, not the party...
...The camera moves in on the vice president and Gorbachev...
...the mismatch of tank and Michael Dukakis...
...The image is what rivets...
...There it is hard to think of anything but blips and bites: the Pledge of Allegiance...
...Research done by Ronald Lembo in the sociology department at Berkeley shows that some television viewers are inclined to follow narrative while others, disproportionately the young, pay more attention to distinct, out-of-context images...
...How do they do in the clutch...
...Print reporters, meanwhile, were unable or unwilling to proceed differently...
...Some, mud makes the slinger slip...
...They could take the audience backstage, behind the horse race, into the paddocks, the stables, the clubhouse, and the bookie joints...
...Here at least is something they know how to do, something they can be good at without defying their starting premise, which is, after all, deference...
...For instance . . . I showed him at the Handicapped Olympics, and I said, you wouldn't know by these pictures that this man tried to cut the budget for the handicapped...
...In the 1980s the American was the paleface captive of redskins...
...To be "interested in politics" is to know how to rate the players: Do they have good hands...
...What professional handlers and television journalists alike do is find images that condense their "little playlets," images that satisfy both lovers of story and lovers of image...
...Some of this was welcomed by reformers, and properly so: gradually, candidates found it harder to whisper to white southern voters what they were afraid to proclaim out loud in the north...
...What is most disturbing is not ignorance in its own right but, rather, the coupling of ignorance and power...
...I know," he said...
...they compete 20 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money on television's terms, leaving the handlers free to set their agendas for them...
...The problem first acquired media currency with a tale told by Hedrick Smith, in his 1988 book The Power Game, about a 1984 campaign piece by Leslie Stahl...
...We haven't been able to figure it out...
...I was tough...
...To a great though not universal extent, the media still haven't...
...In their own fashion, Bush and his handlers—some of them fresh from Reagan's team—followed...
...Passions are disconnected from parties, moral panics disconnected from radical or even liberal politics...
...In short, the politics of the consumer society...
...What is clear, though, is that when the picture is stark enough, or the bite bites hard enough, journalists, especially on television, are unwilling to forgo the drama...
...And whereas young people used to acquire the habit of newspaper reading as they aged, this is apparently no longer happening...
...This campaign metacoverage, coverage of the coverage, partakes of the postmodern fascination with surfaces and the machinery that cranks them out, a fascination indistinguishable from surrender—as if once we understand that all images are concocted we have attained the only satisfaction the heart and mind are capable of...
...The high-minded reformers insisted on a secret ballot...
...Haldeman and Ehrlichman, with their enemies lists and provocateur tactics, were the founding fathers of what Sidney Blumenthal later called "the permanent campaign" —a combination of polling, imagemaking, and popularity-building strategy that Reagan developed to the highest of low arts...
...Here is that preoccupation— indeed, enchantment—with means characteristic of a society that is competitive, bureaucratic, professional, and technological all at once...
...This split corresponds to the highbrow/lowbrow cultural split that developed around the same time, as traced by Lawrence W. Levine in his recent book of that title...
...is the preference for personality over issues new...
...To be boring is the cardinal sin...
...There does . . . appear to be some effect of TV on attention, yet the importance, generality, and nature of the effect is unknown": that is the summary sentence...
...Savviness flatters spectators that they really do understand, that people like them are in charge, that even if they live outside the Beltway, they remain sovereign...
...During the three decades after the Civil War, mass rallies commonly lasted for many hours...
...American politics has been raucous, deceptive, giddy, shallow, sloganeering, and demagogic for most of its history...
...And the piece went on and on like that...
...they wanted enlightened leaders to guide the unwashed...
...In 1952, Eisenhower, whose campaign was the first to buy television spots, was reluctant to advertise...
...or in the bunker at Omaha Beach, simulating the wartime performance he had spared himself during the actual World War II...
...What is not altogether clear, of course, is whether the Reagan staffers were right to be proud of their public relations triumphs...
...And I said, "Come on, that was a tough—what do you mean, 'great piece...
...in 1985, 36 percent thought that either China, India, or Monaco was part of the Soviet Union...
...Embarrassed by their role as relay stations for orchestrated blips and bites, even amply rewarded journalists purport to resent the way Reagan's staff made megaphones of them...
...For 1988 was not only the year of metacoverage...
...the image is what is remembered...
...As the campaigns invite us to read their blips, alarm is amply justified—but not because American politics has fallen from a pastoral of lucid debate and hushed, enlightened discourse to a hellish era of mudslinging and degraded sloganeering...
...their business was to produce what one of them called "our little playlets" —far-flung photo opportunities with real-life backdrops...
...Middle-class outsiders want to be in the know, while the poor withdraw further and don't even vote...
...This is Exhibit B on factors inhibiting press criticism: the competition of the pack, which can produce protracted press honeymoons and pileons...
...Do we detect a chain of causation...
...The adaptability of the apparatus is exhibited by the media success of even so maladroit a figure as George Bush during the 1988 election...
...They just saw the five minutes of beautiful pictures of Ronald Reagan...
...and what would this prophesy for our politics...
...Alongside the waning partisan press, two new kinds of newspapers emerged: the high-minded independent paper with its educated tone, cultivating political discernment...
...There is a lot of this in American culture nowadays: the postmodern high culture of the 1960s (paintings calling attention to their paintedness, novels exposing their novelistic machinery) has swept into popular culture...
...The premium attitude is a sort of knowing appraisal...
...Already in 1950, David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd described what he called the inside dopester—a consumer of politics who may be one who has concluded (with good reason) that since he can do nothing to change politics, he can only understand it...
...Hanna acquired the reputation of a "phrasemaker" for giving the world such bites as "The Advance Agent of Prosperity," "Full Dinner Pail," and "Poverty or Prosperity," which were circulated on posters, cartoons, and envelope stickers, the mass media of the time...
...a campaign of packaging, posed pictures, and slogans...
...Arguably the mass mobilization and hoopla turned out the vote...
...For the networks and the candidates (successful candidates, anyway) share an interest in what they consider "great pictures," that is, images that evoke myths...
...When the nation-state has the power to reach out and blow up cities on the other side of the world, the spirit of diversion seems, to say the least, inadequate...
...The spectacular version of politics that television delivers inspires political withdrawal along with pseudosophistication...
...Who's falling behind...
...there were torchlight parades...
...Here is Stahl's own version of the story as she told it the night after the election on ABC's Viewpoint: This was a five-minute piece on the evening news . . . at the end of President Reagan's '84 campaign, and the point of the piece was to really criticize him for—I didn't use this language in the piece—but the point was, he was trying to create amnesia over the budget cuts...
...but WINTER • 1990 • 23 Culture In an Age of Mew from 1876 to 1900, it was 77 percent...
...The entire saga is present in a single image: Bush the heir, the reliable, the man of strength who is also savvy enough to deal...
...I like to watch" is the premium attitude...
...and if so, is television the cause...
...It rose again in the 1930s, with the Great Depression and the New Deal, and then started sliding again...
...Over the past forty years, Riesman's inside dopester has evolved into another type: a harsher, more brittle and cynical type still more knowledgeable in the ways in which things really work, still more purposefully disengaged, still more knowledgeable in a managerial way, allergic to political commitments...
...In the same vein was the new postdebate ritual: the networks featuring campaign spin doctors, on camera, telling reporters why their respective candidates had done just fine, while the network correspondents affected an arch superiority and print reporters insisted that the spin doctors couldn't spin them...
...They have imposed upon themselves a code they call objectivity but that is more properly understood as a mixture of obsequiousness and fatalism—it is not "their business" in general to affront the authorities, not "their place" to declare who is lying and who is right...
...Having declared that Bush's central problem was to lick the wimp image, the media allowed him to impress them that once he started talking tough he turned out "stronger than expected...
...Politics as a discretionary, episodic, defensive activity for the majority alongside moral politics for the few...
...An image-minded audience got the White House's point—Reagan personified national will and caring, even as the nice-guy martyr to wise-ass Eastern commentators...
...The ultimate inside dopesters are the political journalists...
...The sharply bifurcated media help divide the public: to oversimplify, a progressive middle class takes politics seriously while a diverted working class is for the most part (except for the Great Depression) disaffected...
...to switch channels, "watching" more than one program at once...
...Probably not...
...And the problem, ultimately, is not simply that Americans are ignorant...
...The Associated Press story that ran in the New York Times was headlined: "Yes, You Too Can Get A's While Watching 'Family Ties.' " But the report itself, by Daniel R. Anderson and Patricia A. Collins of the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, is inconclusive on the question of whether television watching affects the capacity to pay attention...
...Starting from the premise that they haven't the right to raise issues the candidates don't raise or explore records the candidates don't explore, they can at least ask a question they feel entitled to answer: "Who's ahead...
...Evaluating the candidates' claims and records was considered highbrow and boring— and potentially worse...
...As the camera moves closer, the stem face and the handshake take over, while the voiceover speaks the incantation: "strong .. . continue the arms control process . . . a president ready to go to work on day one...
...It was a five-minute commercial, you know, unpaid commercial for our campaign...
...The goal is "never to be taken in by any person, cause, or event...
...In a perverse way, the journalists' fancy for 18 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money polls is a stratagem directed toward mastery...
...MacNeil/Lehrer and Geraldo Rivera...
...Someday the grants may flow for the research obligatorily called for...
...By 1988, the obsession had reached new heights, or depths: one night, ABC News devoted fourteen minutes, almost two-thirds of the news section of the newscast, to a poll—a bigger bloc by far than was given to any issue...
...actors face the audience and speak "out of character" in Moonlighting...
...The McLaughlin Group for the know-it-all...
...That obsession is itself worth scrutiny...
...The image cried out for a man to ride out of the sagebrush on a white horse into the White House...
...The president in office could use the 24 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money same skills...
...McGerr presents consider.: able evidence that from 1840 (the "Tippecanoe" campaign) through 1896, vast numbers of people participated in the pageantry of presidential campaigns...
...Curiously, the morning shows, despite their razzmatazz, may have dwelt on issues more than the nightly news—largely because the morning interviewers were not so dependent on Washington insiders, not so tightly bound to the source cultivating and glad-handing that guide reportage inside the Beltway...
...Their masterwork was a Bush commercial that opens with a still photo on the White House lawn: Reagan to the right, at the side of the frame...
...were obsessed with the question of whether media images had become the campaign, and if so, whose fault that was...
...Reagan is left behind—having presided, he yields 22 • DISSENT Culture in an Aga of Mom gracefully to his successor, the new man of the hour...
...I recall a conversation I had with a network correspondent in 1980...
...Many in the news media had finally figured out one thing they could do differently...
...If you have a scorecard, you can tell the players...
...Meanwhile, the presumably unspinnable pundits rattled on about how the candidates performed, whether WINTER • 1990 • 19 Culture In an Age of Money they had given good sound bite—issuing reviews, in other words, along with behindthescenes assessments of the handlers' skill in setting expectations for the performance, so that, for example, if Dan Quayle succeeded in speaking whole sentences he was to be decreed a success in "doing what he set out to do...
...He will go to great lengths to keep from looking and feeling like the uninformed outsider...
...An Audience for the Spectacle More must be said about what I just called the image-minded audience...
...Keeping up with the maneuvers of Washington insiders, defining the issues as they define them, savviness appeals to a spirit both managerial and voyeuristic...
...Is there, in a word, an MTV generation...
...Politics, real politics, is for "players"—fascinating term, for it implies that everyone else is a spectator...
...Who's gaining...
...More than one-fifth of Northern voters probably played an active part in the campaign organizations of each presidential contest during the '70s and '80s," McGerr writes...
...We've been trying to figure out what we can do differently...
...Think of the American medical student kissing American soil after the troops had evacuated him from Grenada...
...Although I pose the question in an extreme form, it is hardly alien to 1988's endless campaign journalism...
...They saw the balloons, they saw the flags, they saw the red, white and blue...
...Thank you very much...
...In the pilot film for the 1987 television series Max Headroom, an investigative reporter discovers that an advertiser is compressing television commercials into almost instantaneous "blipverts," units so high-powered they can cause some viewers to explode...
...by last year, the number of everyday readers had fallen by almost one-third, to 50.6...
...Under their leadership, they worked toward a new-style campaign: a campaign of education...
...The result is what many people call a postmodern move, in two senses: enchantment with the means toward the means and ingratiation via a pass at deconstruction...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
