Conventional Matters
KITMAN, MARVM
Onlelevision CONVENTIONAL MATTERS BY MARVIN KITMAN The big question before the networks aired the 1984 Democratic National Convention on the evenings of July 16-19 was whether the party could...
...His speech on Wednesday was fascinating in a negative way...
...If Jackson brings you up, Gary Hart, another erstwhile candidate for the Democratic nomination, brings you down...
...In any case, to the average Nielsen family "dull" and "boring" are synonymous with Democrat and Republican...
...In fact, the 1984 Democratic National Convention was not a television show...
...you could see how wet people were...
...The excitement he provided included an apology to the Jews for the scandalous remarks he had made during his campaign for the nomination...
...After the election you don't hear about the Vice President...
...Whoever heard of a politician admitting he made a mistake...
...It sounded like mutilating cliches was one of his new ideas...
...Zillions were spent in the hilly city this summer...
...The camera loved him, and so did I. Seeing this learned, intelligent fellow performing so well on the tube, I couldn't help thinking that for someone who didn't speak English until he was eight, the Governor had come a long way...
...It was fluke, I figured—until the Reverend Jesse Jackson took over the following night...
...I understand the networks are quite sore at him...
...Except for 1976, it had accomplished this every four years since 1972, when George McGovern delivered his acceptance speech during prime time in Hawaii and Guam, thereby winning himself several Guamanian votes...
...He went so far as to tell parents to "stop their kids from watching TV...
...Granted, Mondale is not known as Dr...
...How do you feel about this tumultuous reception...
...Next came Fritz Mondale's accident, establishing him as Master of the Definite Maybe...
...By 1988, one gathers, the nation-al ritual will be reduced to 15-second film clips between commercials on news programs...
...Whatever, the Democrats resurrected the ancient idea of making speeches that have an effect...
...Jackson was almost as magnificent on the screen as Cuomo...
...I may have to eat my words, however, about how fascinating the conventions have become...
...All those up-the-nostril shots should win the Democrats the cinema-verite vote...
...Sure it is costly to fly out to these get-togethers and set up base and everything...
...It is my civic duty, therefore, to underscore his message...
...After a convention that gave us four of the best political speeches of the last decade—Cuomo's, Jackson's, Ferraro's, and Senator Edward Kennedy's too—plus the finest one Fritz is likely to deliver in his life, I was horrified to hear rumblings that the quadrennial coverage would be cut further in years to come...
...The stage had been set with the naming of a Democratic Vice Presidential candidate...
...For a change, television didn't make itself the big star...
...This is what real reporting is about," CBS anchorman Dan Rather sagely observed up in his booth, scratching his nose...
...This is the sort of thinking that makes ABC third in our hearts when it comes to the news...
...Onlelevision CONVENTIONAL MATTERS BY MARVIN KITMAN The big question before the networks aired the 1984 Democratic National Convention on the evenings of July 16-19 was whether the party could find a new way to use television to defeat itself...
...Nor could you call it theater, although it was theatrical...
...It's now a very clean organization that argues a lot, on and off TV...
...Even Fritz was interesting when he finally got the crowd's attention Thursday evening...
...Andy Cuomo deserves an Emmy Award for Best Director...
...I'm sure the line got by many at home...
...Anyone who tuned in a day late could easily have gotten the impression Jackson was rousing a black Freedom Democrats meeting in Yazoo City, Mississippi, since the screen at least was filled with black delegates...
...The Republicans, I hear, are bringing a gaggle of singing Osmonds to Dallas this August...
...The Nielsen families are hardly fit to run television, let alone America...
...The Return of Oratory was a hell of a story...
...Reu-ven Frank, the former president turned editorial adviser of NBC News, and the continuing executive producer of its convention coverage—he's been around for these TV events since he invented them (1952)—summed up the situation for me...
...It didn't help agreat deal...
...The sightlines were astound-ingly bad for 85 per cent of the audience...
...The director also kept switching from Ferraro to grainy pictures of some fat politician beaming admiringly...
...The crowd reaction portraits were the networks' major form of editorializing...
...The one third of us who like politics shape the country and make things happen...
...I had never heard such a long talk about nothing before...
...Soon the crowd was floating on the River Jordan...
...This year the trio was united in exercising their constitutional prerogative to limit our right to know to the highlights—or lowlights, depending on what they judged to be exciting...
...He had all the buzz words ever invented strungtogether...
...One reason for Cuomo's success may be that his performance was relatively uninterrupted by such distractions (I did see a bit too much of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in rapture underneath the rostrum, though...
...Bill Moy-ers asked astutely on CBS...
...For the first time, too, none of the networks were committed to the old so-called gavel-to-gavel coverage...
...Their style of coverage was supposed to be a kind of "Best of the Convention," like those blooper shows they do...
...ABC again led the way with a plan to save viewers from wearying hours in San Francisco: On the second night, when only Jesse Jackson was scheduled to speak, it wittily threw up a rerun of Hart to Hart...
...Opening night of the convention, feeling myself about to snooze, I got up to change the channel to the Mets game like any redblooded American when I heard New York Governor Mario Cuomo begin his keynote address...
...But that night he suddenly came across on the tube as Presidential...
...That was nice of them...
...Instead, he spoke with warmth and compassion...
...So the networks had to build their own structures, enormous three-story jobs dubbed the Towers of Babble...
...So what...
...Everybody was talking about Congress woman Geraldine Ferraro...
...I was transfixed, standing up—true charisma can do that, can make a person stop in his tracks...
...He turned phrases, controlled the pauses, didn't talk over the applause, explained complicated emotions and concepts, and didn't even seem to be reading from a Teleprompter...
...Most were focusing on his plan to raise taxes...
...The complicated piece of business was described to me by a network news official: "He told Bert Lance, I'm going to make you chairman of the Democratic Party, I think.' Then he called [Charles T.] Manatt [the current chairman] and said, 'I think you're fired.'" The real action was a series of incredible public speaking performances...
...And it had all the elements of an old-fashioned suspense drama, with a different star every night...
...An old political maxim has it that a President should never be nominated in an arena unsuitable for playing basketball...
...Jekyll for nothing...
...they've been managing to clear out the bosses and the voters together...
...By all advance projections, the Democrats' 1984 gala was going to be a memorable affair, especially since almost nobody would be able to see anything or anyone from the floor...
...Very nice," he answered, I believe into a CBS microphone...
...The truth is, the networks want out...
...I was among the millions who thought the convention would be a bust...
...Then George McGovern started to talk and they cut him off in midsentence...
...Mondale is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of television...
...That's what network reporting actually is about: two-second exclusive interviews and meat-ax editing...
...They feel less and less of an obligation to cover public issues and events now that it is no longer necessary for them to earn brownie points at the Federal Communications Commission...
...The entertainment gimmicks arranged to cover up the customary boredom were ignored: It got so you hardly noticed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on ice skates...
...Equally interesting were the newspaper reports the following morning implying he was boring...
...In the past, ABC had been the only one of the Big Three to violate the sacred trust of showing the American public the entire proceedings...
...An even bigger breakthrough was the inability of the networks to see very much either...
...Something went awry out West...
...Formaldehyde and Mr...
...Because the Moscone is a municipal auditorium, its steel girders are too weak to hold the usual suspended broadcast booths...
...The weird thing about watching him facing the banner-wavers was that they were crying again...
...The other two thirds is ill-fed from buying the junk foods TV ads specialize in, ill-clothed in the jeans and other haberdashery pushed, and ill-informed as well...
...Their present muscle-flexing is a byproduct of getting drunk on President Reagan's deregulation brew...
...If World War II broke out in the streets of San Francisco," Reuven Frank explained, "I'd be able to cover the whole 20-minute struggle...
...The hot subject was not which network had the better booth, the most dynamic anchorperson, the most aggressive floor reporters, or the most modern equipment...
...somebody finally asked the ex-candidate...
...The delivery didn't help matters: Hart paused at the wrong spots and split sentences...
...Ferraro proved herself a plus on TV Thursday night, despite the Marquis de Sade's seeming to direct the pool coverage...
...Maybe it was real life...
...there were still those arches in the way, severely blocking the camera angles...
...But along with all the other pundits I was wrong...
...The auditorium was darkened for the Governor's address on the instructions, it is said, of his son...
...When Hart returned to the floor bedlam broke out—reporters and delegates and TV crews began fighting, punching and scratching their way to him...
...It is also true that only one of every three Americans watched the goings-on at the Moscone Center...
...Of course, people weep at Dynasty nowadays...
...That was the single most courageous act of a Democratic political figure in our times...
...I had assumed Cuomo would give the usual spiel about how great the donkeys are...
...He played the podium like a cathedral organ, moving me through the valley of simplistic explanation of inflation, through the emotional highs of contrition and the future of the disenfranchised—with the sweat pouring off him like evangelical drops...
...The party abandoned this longstanding principle when it hired San Francisco's Moscone Center, a coffin-shaped exhibition hall with no height to it and all the seats on one level...
...There was no story in San Francisco, the networks had decided—probably after their first good look at Presidential nominee-presumptive Walter "Fritz" Mondale...
Vol. 67 • July 1984 • No. 13
