On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision CANCELING THE ELECTIONS by marvin kitman T. he height of network irresponsibility during the 1980 Presidential campaign was the ABC News telephone poll immediately following the...
...The result would show who had won, we were told...
...If you want to be fancy, call it a "panel show," or an expanded version of Meet the Press...
...It wasn't the close race the tube had for weeks been telling us it would be...
...This contest went exactly as predicted...
...Sic transit Gloria De Haven, not to mention Lincoln-Douglas...
...that the elderly are more likely than the young to phone in...
...NBC won the competition to be first to announce the victor, doing so only 15 minutes after the polls closed in New Jersey...
...I was shocked at how upset young viewers were by the confrontation in Cleveland...
...You can look it up, as Al Smith might have said, in a dictionary...
...In fact, I'd have preferred to see Reagan, Carter and Anderson discuss that lurid flick and comment on drugs, law enforcement, attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of foreign powers, and prison reform...
...The election returns are supposed to be the drama, even if this requires something of a charade, not the scramble to project the winners...
...Not that who would win the Presidency was the big question in TV circles on November 4. In my town it was not nearly as important as the rating race involving the television premier of The Deer Hunter, a film once considered too violent to be broadcast...
...I wonder what took them so long...
...I hold the League responsible for the desecration of debates on TV, for lending their good name to this vapid huckstering...
...He knows how to answer questions, having had years of training appearing on network press conference-style shows...
...You're hacking...
...The ABC gaffe enabled television stations and newspapers to announce within minutes of the summations that Reagan beat Carter 2-1...
...But the League, clad in its ostrich plumes, goes on pretending nothing has changed...
...I'm sorry, you failed to answer the question," the moderator could say, "too bad...
...They blurt out the results, ruining it for those who, God forbid, might want to go out and vote, or teach their kids about the agony of victory and the thrill of defeat...
...This is an amazing turn in the history of our political discourse, and we can thank the League of Women Voters for helping to bring it about...
...You didn't have to be a Pat Caddel to know this would be the case...
...The only telephone poll you can trust, as an old political adage warns, is the one with wires on it...
...The other guys says something and his worthy opponent comes back with, "You're full of baloney...
...I used to look forward to television on election night when who would win was a mystery...
...Yet we have let our penchant for playing games transform everything into a game or drama...
...Executives at our local WOR-TV must have been gloating as Robert de Niro beat the pants off network TV's election night coverage...
...The big answer was in by 8:15 p.m...
...I'm a new man, running for the highest office—then I was only governor...
...Heck, if CBS had aired the "Who Shot J. R...
...It's bad enough that young people think a debate consists of four-to-six old newspaper reporters who look like bankers asking convoluted questions that nobody answers...
...Youngsters today feel there is something devious about questioning a candidate's prior statements...
...But what about all the other stories that TV chooses not to cover quickly or in depth with this wonderful technology...
...My own 16-year-old daughter complained that Carter was always on Reagan'sback...
...TV will concoct a scenario even where none exists...
...Six guys interviewing the two guys running for the White House is not a debate...
...One teenager, interviewed in a post-debate debriefing on WABC's local Eyewitness News, mumbled that he didn't like the way Carter "hacked" at Reagan...
...This year it was very exciting watching Tom Brokaw and David Brinkley jockey for the pontification award...
...Well, if TV is going to dominate the political process during the campaign, its procedures should also prevail after the election...
...Car crash-ings, beatings and shootings don't faze them a bit...
...Historians may someday write that 1980 saw the first truly "television" election...
...In the early days of TV, you could ask a guy a question and he might start to shake as he put a glass of water to his lips while composing his thoughts...
...The specter of losing a job can make men do strange things...
...Every four years it gets worse...
...K JL^lection night coverage itself was dismaying, too...
...That was the understatement of the century, especially since there are some people who think "unscientific" is good: It sounds sort of superscientific and official...
...Or he might suddenly stutter...
...Or, "There you go again, bringing up something I said when I was a kid [61 years old...
...Only verbal violence is not condoned...
...Body language told us a lot more than words...
...If the League insists on continuing the Q & A approach, at least the panelists should be given buzzers they can push when the candidate strayed...
...I found Midnight Express on ABC more relevant than the rival September 20 Reagan-Anderson snooze-fest carried live on NBC and CBS...
...With elections they don't play along...
...One guy says something, and the other guy replies, "You're full of baloney...
...We are only reporting the news," they piously protest...
...By now, anyone who's made it to the top politically knows make-up and lighting and has plenty of advisors...
...A real debate might also be helpful...
...Weshould be able to cancel a President after 13 weeks if his show gets bad ratings...
...The League expects us to feel guilty if we don't love, let alone watch, their panel show as raptly as Monday Night Football...
...We have become a country where a heel like J. R. Ewing is made a hero, and stupidity is glorified on a scale that rivals the Know-Nothingism of 1824...
...Maybe the League could take a tip from Chuck Barris and install a gong that the panelists could hit when they've heard enough...
...But they accept all kinds of physical mayhem on television...
...A candidate can now declare with impunity, "Hey, that was the old days...
...That's not very responsible of you...
...Television has reduced our elections to battles of commercials: Let each man have his say for 30 seconds, breeze past the issues, and keep it positive...
...The absence of audience shots in the Reagan-Anderson debate gave it the atmosphere of a panel discussion held in a wax museum, with canned applause and a crowd of dummies going wild...
...Touche...
...David scooped up the Iron Man medal—a gallstone divided into 3 parts—for coming to work so soon after his gall bladder operation...
...If you have to stoop to examining your opponent's record, then you must be guilty of something...
...When it comes to sports coverage, however, the networks exercise the restraint they should save for the elections: During the '72 Olympics ABC held back the news that Mark Spitz had already won the 7th gold medal until two minutes before 11 p.m...
...On top of that, they seem to consider it poor form to scrutinize a man's political past...
...TV news executive Reuven Frank calls it a lot of baloney...
...It could even be said that it is irresponsible of them to make the heart of our democracy so dull and boring...
...Under the new political roles of the TV age you can no longer say, as Al Smith used to say on radio, "Let's look at the record...
...It is hard to believe a sophisticated electronic news gathering organization, one of the largest employers of statisticians, researchers and similar specialists, didn't know that people in sparsely populated rural areas have a greater chance of getting their calls through than city dwellers...
...It does not seem too much to ask the networks to help make the balloting more interesting for us citizens...
...Afterward, ABC admitted its poll was "unscientific...
...There are never any alterations in the format designed to help the viewer learn more about the candidates...
...And we have accepted this con job as a real debate...
...What the ladies have been palming off since 1976 is really a joint press conference, with the candidates sharing an hour on TV answering questions...
...Elections are the very core of democracy, the thing that distinguishes us from other less free people...
...OnTelevision CANCELING THE ELECTIONS by marvin kitman T. he height of network irresponsibility during the 1980 Presidential campaign was the ABC News telephone poll immediately following the October 28 Cleveland debate...
...The logic behind the instant projections on Election Night has always escaped me...
...In 1980, for example, the League allowed the virtual censorship of studio audience reaction, one of the few unmanip-ulated audiovisual aids left to home viewers...
...It's OK for football players to spend their sabbaths maiming each other...
...I never saw so many steel fists in kid gloves...
...We forget...
...Of course, the amount of social responsibility the networks have—I can hear Fred Allen say in that nasal tone—could be put in the naval of an ant, and you'd still have room left over for the Consititution and all 26 Amendments...
...There is an illusion of reality, not reality...
...Apparently the Youth of America doesn't know that you're supposed to go after your opponent in a debate...
...The networks claim that since they have the computers and the technology, it is their sacred duty to use them...
...But the maneuvering between Brokaw and Brinkley on NBC was nothing compared to what went on between Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS...
...Give us a break...
...that rich folk can more easily afford to spend 50 cents for a phone call than the poor...
...The League should be ashamed of itself for perpetrating the hoaxes it calls Presidential "debates" on American TV viewers...
...No one learns a thing from the League's Q & A game...
...Viewers were asked to register their reactions by dialing different phone numbers for Reagan and Carter...
...At the Republican convention, for instance, all the blather about Ford for Vice President was the invention of TV people...
...episode of Dallas on November 4, the election would have gotten a slice of the ratings pie so thin you couldn't have seen it...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 22
