On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television MONDAY MORNING JOURNALISM BY MARVIN KITMAN I had come to think of Lawrence Spivak as sort of the Captain Kangaroo of public affairs programming, without the Captain's warm smile....
...Then there was the achievement of having Hubert Humphrey as a guest more often than any other Sunday morning competition: 25 times, at last count...
...The hope was that Spivak in his last appearance would have something special up his sleeve, like finally revealing his stance...
...It marked the first time a President of the United States was openly sponsored by the oil interests he usually claims to be protecting us from...
...Listening to his press conference-type show—a television form he is credited with inventing in 1947—was a Sunday morning ritual, like going to church...
...During his last five minutes on the air that morning...
...The dignity of the highest office in the land, it seemed to me, should not be exploited in this manner, regardless of the momen-tousness of an occasion like the stepping down of a producer-moderator...
...I sometimes think that Spivak's most prominent achievement was providing the Times with so many headlines on Monday mornings...
...Insiders were predicting the President might even grant exclusives to The Rowan & Martin Report, should this new news show have its expected premiere as an ABC series in January, and to Chevy Chase's "Weekend Update" segment on NBC's Saturday Night...
...For practice, they have been known to stage another completely different show called "Beat the Clock," where the grillee tries to stall the grillers till time runs out...
...There aren't many outlets open to a President of the United States since the White House lost the power to automatically pre-empt prime-time programming with the retirement of that early-evening idol, Richard Nixon...
...These advantages notwithstanding, politicians have perfected a variety of techniques for giving non-answers...
...The usual TV press conference allows the President, or whoever has called it, to remain pretty much in control through the questioners he recognizes...
...In the beginning...
...Meet the Press went after the important people...
...The Exxon commercials kept interrupting the latest exclusive appearance...
...He was honestly against smoking before it became fashionable...
...Not that guests were a problem...
...The commercial may have been one of the longest in the history of television...
...Another little known Spivak accomplishment was his turning the Merkle Press into a hugely successful publishing house...
...Although, in all honesty, the last few years I haven't been attending Meet the Press as much as I should either...
...Res-ton often seemed to ask questions based on his column of that Sunday morning (as was the case when he asked Gerald Ford about his attitude toward "the same old geezers" running for President...
...In addition, it seemed a bit improper for a President of the United States to make such an unabashed pitch for a mere television program...
...He pioneered in inviting newspaper journalists, or printheads, to ask questions...
...Spivak had been around on NBC's Meet the Press for as long as I could remember, glowering and intimidating me, if not his guests...
...You might think they are afraid of being mugged, but they're not that stupid...
...As Bill Greeley of Variety observed the week before the Meet the Press booking was announced, "Candidate Ford appears to be bucking for the Guiness Book of Records in exclusive interviews with an incumbent...
...It was the first time, too, that a President of the United States delivered a commercial for a TV program...
...A little known Spivak achievement was his making important people stop smoking...
...Normally, this would have been a scheduling coup, a fitting way to bring the curtain down on Spivak...
...Is he a liberal or conservative...
...You can't even get a decent sandwich in New York on a Sunday night...
...Most distressing of all, the President didn't come close to capturing Spivak's unique achievements as the founding father of the Sunday intellectual ghetto political press conference-type show...
...Indeed, it became a case of the tail starting to wag the dog...
...No President of the United States had ever appeared on a Sunday political show...
...Greeley cited Ford's exclusive interviews with newsman Art Alpert for a Providence TV station, with Jack Anderson (turned down by everyone including public television before it was eventually presented on William F Buckley's Firing Line), and with a group of Metromedia newsmen the first week in November...
...Would he be making similar pitches for other networks' Sunday morning press conferences under the equal time rules...
...And Spivak pioneered in allowing panelists follow-up questions...
...In any event, Gerald Ford's appearance was an example of what I'm talking about...
...Ford endorsed the administration of Meet the Press so warmly that it sounded as if Spivak was the best chief executive television's granddaddy of press conference shows ever had...
...To this day, I've never heard of anything else published by Merkle Press...
...The Meet the Press format is tougher because Spivak set it up so that the questions are asked in seriatim...
...They didn't live and work together like television journalists...
...A major part of the political media consultant's work, in fact, is to train his boy to counter the tough questions likely to be confronted on Meet the Press...
...But nothing materialized along these lines...
...Humphrey was the favorite Meet the Press standby...
...But the President's appearances on television are not that exciting anymore...
...Playing the invisible man may well have been the secret of his survival all those years...
...Two examples: Ed Newman is on the side of enlightened liberalism...
...Spivak's achievements also included asking the toughest questions on his show, the ones the print journalists were too awed or too embarrassed to ask...
...Meet the Press and Spivak, historians may well conclude, were not so much Sunday television as Monday journalism...
...I don't know...
...Spivak made the program the most feared place to be questioned by the media...
...Smoking in Spivak's presence, insiders said, was the best way to learn that behind that ill-tempered face lies an ill-tempered person...
...Even Larry smiled—something I had never seen before—possibly out of embarrassment at the effusiveness...
...His illustrious career in TV journalism ended on November 9 with a special one-hour edition starring Gerald Ford in the hot scat...
...This happened approximately 70 times over the 28-year Spivak administration...
...Whenever some other guest couldn't make it...
...Fittingly, Humphrey was the guest on the penultimate Spivak show, November 2. "With Hubert Humphrey," one public affairs producer explained, "you don't need four other guys to ask questions...
...Eric Sevareid is on both sides of every question...
...Reston, for example, was frequently wheeled out when a statesman was needed to question other statesmen...
...As the President sang the praises of "Larry's" contributions to American journalism, I found myself wishing one of the hard-nosed newsmen on the panel (James Reston of the New York Times, David Broder of the Washington Post, George Will of the National Review), or the one soft-nosed TV newsman (Bill Monroe of NBC), would ask whether the President was getting paid to do the spot...
...They (those who are concerned about maintaining the dignity of the highest office of the land) said it couldn't be done...
...But at least print journalists came from different directions...
...Nevertheless, Gerald Ford's debut on the Sunday morning press conference circuit as Chief Executive—he appeared six times as a Congressman—was important historically...
...It generated two page one stories, although I bet nobody can recall what they were about anymore...
...If they strung together all 25 of Hubert's appearances, they would get one good show...
...My own list begins with the fact that the man managed to remain on the same program for 28 years, a not inconsiderable record in a business like television...
...Still, it was something of a shock to learn that Spivak was finally retiring after 28 years as Torque-mada of the airwaves...
...he could always be counted on to fill in...
...The imitations of Meet the Press —Face the Nation on CBS and Issues and Answers on ABC—used their own network television journalists as their biggest guns...
...A guy who is not allowed to smoke while waiting in the ante-room before going on could become so nervous that he would spill his guts on the air...
...Another producer said...
...For a quarter (it used to be a dime) Merkle will send you the transcript of any Meet the Press session...
...Sunday is traditionally a dead news day in New York...
...spivak's most amazing achievement, perhaps, has been that to this day nobody has been able to figure out where he stands philosophically or politically, even though he always asked intelligent, probing questions...
...One never knew for sure if printheads came up with better questions...
...Yet I have always been able to tell where other major TV newsmen stand...
...It was one of the disappointments of the final show in Spivak's career that he seemed to fall down in this department by not pressing the guest against the wall, even briefly...
...For some reason reporters don't like to dig the news out of the city's streets that day...
...This may have had a psychological effect on guests...
...It certainly was very embarrassing for this political outsider sitting at home in New Jersey...
...before long, you weren't important unless you had been on it...
Vol. 58 • December 1975 • No. 24
