Programming the Presidential Debates
FRANK, REUVEN
Perspectives PROGRAMMING THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES BY REUVEN FRANK The question raised when Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, walked out of a meeting called by the League of Women Voters...
...But the League of Women Voters, mindful of more public attention than it has ever had or is likely to get, seems ready to do anything the candidates want to hang on to this heady public notice...
...We couldn't contemplate not using those pictures once we had them...
...One reporter's floor pass per network, he announced...
...That's a decision even today to be defended to the death, or you should get out of news and into government or public relations...
...That is why the president of CBS News lost his temper and left the League meeting when someone told him to shut up—because people who don't care about television were trying to limit and control the picture at the other end, the audience end...
...Finally Reinsch arrived...
...When the shouting and red faces and bared teeth had spent themselves, Leonard said that, on the other hand, he had managed to get us some extra messengers' passes...
...And it has changed forever how television works...
...I am long out of these things, but I presume he was right this time, too...
...When there are no cutaways and you are otherwise told precisely what to show and what not to show, you are not carrying a real event and the FCC's silly little rule is being violated to begin with, isn't it...
...Salant lost his temper the same way in Chicago the Monday morning of the 1968 Democratic National Convention...
...I have often wondered whether I should have walked out with him...
...Shouting...
...Only the odor was left, the odor you learned about in 1952, expected every time you came back, and always found...
...Disaster...
...Reporters learn about the League when they start covering politics, any politics...
...And Carter...
...we filled the comfortable chairs...
...The party had wanted none at all...
...They learn that politicians consider it an organization of goddam pussy cats, which is what Thurber's Serious Drinker called the ladies in the cocktail lounge...
...Like the bikers who picked up the film of the clubbings and the tear gas we could not cover live...
...Drama...
...Now Dick Salant has walked out again...
...Television is always being changed by people who tend not to watch it much, who do not know All In The Family from Starsky and Hutch...
...And if it's some abstruse piece of school financing only an accountant can understand, you put everything aside and try to formulate an answer, because nothing can kill you faster than a blank space in your column in the mail box of every postal patron in your district...
...So the reporters asking the questions have been vetted by the candidates, have they...
...These people think of it as a pipe: The desirable is to be inserted at one end and received unchanged at the other...
...All the networks are carrying the event...
...Dick Salant had walked out of Leonard Reinsch's meeting (that again being how I remember it) because the politicans wanted total control of what people would see...
...Leonard Reinsch, who every four years stopped being a television executive to help the Democratic National Committee run its bash, had asked us to meet him and talk about credentials for the reporters on the convention floor, the live cameramen, the people who seek out those willing to talk, and Don't Forget Radio...
...So John Chancellor and Frank McGee and Sander Vanocur and Edwin Newman and Mike Wallace and Martin Agronsky and all the others roved the floor in '68 because they had messengers' passes...
...Nixon in '72 and Carter in '76 achieved this cleverly, without any of Daley's force majeure...
...But we got the news on...
...Television people, freely admitting they are stupid, venal and tasteless, insist that because they are the only party with no end to achieve they are the only ones who should control what is seen...
...Leonard Reinsch did better by us than we were prepared to admit that terrible Monday morning...
...But the resolution has obscured what happened...
...Of course, they choose the questions...
...I don't know what else you know if you're the League of Women Voters, but this you must know: If you control the questioners, you control the questions...
...Besides, television people know how television works...
...They saw to it that nothing was available for coverage which they did not control...
...Being told to shut up was just the last little straw...
...He now produces Weekend...
...And you're the incumbent and you're busy all the time...
...Now these pussy cats are presenting Presidential debates in which the debaters choose the questioners...
...Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodesl Goddam pussy cats...
...Reinsch sat behind the big desk...
...it can do you no good, but it can hurt you...
...they want their proceedings driven unmodified and unsullied into the American mind, into the heads of the boobs who have nothing better to do than watch TV Just as Ford does...
...But I know in my bones that is why he walked out...
...Whether he actually did leave or we talked him into staying, I don't clearly recall, but his deputy stayed, along with the rest of us...
...They don't want coverage the way reporters understand coverage...
...Where are the lawyers when you need them...
...Leonard was late...
...It was not the refusal to allow cutaways, pictures of the audience listening—although they would show that indeed there was an audience listening—that got him angry...
...Some of us think political conventions are supposed to smell like that...
...Pleas...
...Reuven Frank was president of NBC News from 1968 to 1973, when he decided it wasn't enough fun...
...It wasn't even somebody saying shut up to him that raised Salant's blood pressure...
...It was the fact that individuals for whom television exists only when it can serve their ends want to control it—not to be on it, but to control it...
...Pictures of prizewinners hung on the paneled walls...
...The parties are tired of floor reporters...
...I haven't talked to Dick Salant since I withdrew from the Eastern Establishment Media Conspiracy...
...He thought the purpose of news organizations was to report the news...
...And the League of Women Voters...
...Anyway, there we were, take it or leave it, in the office of an official of Chicago's International Amphitheater, where cattle shows are held, where Eisenhower and Stevenson were nominated in 1952, and Nixon in 1960...
...Actually, poor old Leonard had done his best...
...Pandemonium...
...The convention was to start in the evening and Mayor Richard Daley had arranged an electricians' strike so that we could not have live coverage anywhere except in the hall...
...The pieces got on the air out of chronology and every which way...
...By 1968, even the three-board white fences of the pens and cattle runs had been dismantled...
...your opponent is some smart-ass college boy with all the answers—nobody reads them, but he's got them?who doesn't have to spend a minute of his day finagling a favor for a constituent...
...And underneath everything the odor of a century of ordure and offal, although the stockyards were long gone from just outside that lace-curtained window...
...just a little bit, but forever...
...Because he was right...
...It is always asking questions...
...Perspectives PROGRAMMING THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES BY REUVEN FRANK The question raised when Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, walked out of a meeting called by the League of Women Voters to plan the Presidential debates has been resolved...
...If I am right, then he was right...
...To pols the League is a nuisance...
...Those who work in television see it differently, and that—I wonder if you understand—is the problem...
...Threats...
...Nor was it the FCC nonsense that the networks may not present a Presidential debate but are allowed to carry it as news if someone else arranges it as an event...
...If you don't answer the questionnaire it publishes your blank spaces alongside your opponent's detailed responses and mails the whole thing to every postal patron in your district...
...After more than an hour had gone by, Salant sprang to his feet and said he was a busy man and to hell with these people and CBS was leaving...
...And the League of Women Voters went along with that...
...If I remember right, Hubert Humphrey's acceptance speech was interrupted by one of them because we could not put it on before, as it was happening...
...If they're interested in sewers that year, you have to answer about sewers...
Vol. 59 • October 1971 • No. 20
