Mixed Returns
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television MIXED RETURNS BY MARVIN KITMAN The big loser on election night was not Walter Mondale, as most people have been led to believe, but Dan Rather of CBS News. The nation's leading...
...Why, I know some people who watched for nothing...
...It was almost as if none of the reporters knew what to say until the latest computer printout arrived...
...Can Ronald Reagan make it a 50-state sweep...
...Moyers said, no, the South had always been conservative, racist, fundamentalist, religious, patriotic, against welfare, and so forth...
...The people are stupid, especially the young," explained my 27-year-old son, the law student...
...Dan asked Bill Moyers if he wasn't surprised by the President's strong showing in the South...
...Which may explain their constantly turning to the exit polls...
...Early this year, therefore, one heard much discussion about the efforts at CBS News to find an appropriate part for him in the 1984 spectacular...
...Jennings has always struck me as too young and handsome...
...This is a form of analysis where you get another expert to say what you already know...
...That should put a chill into the chili recipe at CBS...
...Dan looked bad right from the beginning that night...
...We don't sit on stories ." It's a good thing the atomic bomb was not invented by the television networks...
...But he came back strong...
...That the race was close...
...he is paid more...
...As for the election itself, what with all the blather on the tube that night and since, I'm surprised nobody has seen the real meaning of President Reagan's "wipeout...
...Actually, Jennings talks like a Canadian David Brinkley...
...Telling the audience how wonderful it is to know in advance that a candidate will win 50 states is traditionally not a get-out-the-vote spur...
...The same thing was said to have happened to President Reagan before his first televised debate last fall...
...Anyone in Rather's position probably should be scrutinized...
...He was contagious, too: I kept jumping up to turn the dial and take a break from his hyper, even frantic, manner of calling the race, which didn't seem so fraught with drama...
...One exit poll said this, another said that...
...This past election season you could see Jennings growing increasingly familiar with the whole process...
...as they say in TV journalism circles...
...Well, Moyers responded, if you're a racist, a fundamentalist and a patriotic zealot opposed to spending money on blacks and the poor, this was a good day...
...Maybe more important...
...Southerners were supporting the man who stood for their beliefs...
...Commonwealth types are like that...
...Surely Dan has been around long enough to realize that in a presidential election people do not visit their polling places to vote for aldermen...
...During the primaries and conventions Brinkley, the resident analyst at ABC News, was ever-present at Jennings' elbow—apparently on guard lest he say Mondale was "standing" for office instead of "running" or, in President Reagan's case, "lying down...
...I don't think it's any of his business what goes on in this country," one of my neighbors said...
...At 7:30 p.m...
...The newspapers said he was given a 3,800-page book of facts and had to stay up nights filling his head with them...
...He began babbling...
...Dan Rather has more influence on the people...
...He's now smoother than Liberty of London silk at presiding over our American rituals...
...At $1 million, or whatever his fee was for stepping aside prematurely so Rather could replace him prematurely, Cronkite must have been the most highly paid television viewer in history...
...As of next January she will be co-anchor of The CBS Morning News...
...The TV executives won't stop it...
...Just because he's a handsome guy, you assume he is a bum reporter...
...Yet oddly enough nobody is saying that Dan's debacle proves he is senile...
...Nothing, however, is likely to alter the obsession of all three networks with exit polls...
...Then he added that Walter Mondale's score was "zero, none, zip, nada...
...So was the President...
...This seemed to suggest that the initial returns didn't matter...
...Jennings was doing fine on November 6 until 9:47 p.m...
...It was finally decided his appropriate role would be to stay home and watch the exit-poll findings on the tube...
...I can't remember one of these quadrennial events when we weren't all depending on Cronkite...
...Space limitations prevent a listing of his nonachievements, but two words suffice: Phyllis George...
...one suspected he had jodhpurs on beneath his Savile Row jacket...
...He also made the average person's ballot appear to have so much weight that I wanted to hop a Regency Air flight to Los Angeles and vote there myself, several times...
...The California polls could open at 4 a.m . on election day...
...This isn't Russia," declared NBC News President Larry Grossman...
...Why aren't the other two networks raising the age issue...
...It seems to be impossible to work with the North Carolinian without acquiring those raised eyebrows in his voice...
...My own suggestion is to have Westerners vote earlier...
...EST, when the polls would be closed everywhere in the country except for American Samoa and Guam...
...Uncle Walter, who started tallying the returns on CBS in 1952, became an American tradition, like the polls not being closed in California yet...
...The main thing all the networks did election night was tell us how out of touch we were with the real Ronald Reagan...
...He may have OD'd on it...
...He broke new ground, too, in discounting the bandwagon and other effects of publicizing statistical projections of the outcome of a race...
...The essence of their competition seems to be finding new ways to abuse the monster they have heavily invested in to forecast elections on the basis of 2.4 or so votes—despite my attacking the practice in these pages (See " Canceling the Elections," NL, December 1, 1980...
...He also seemed overly involved with his British affectations...
...The race to be the first to project the winner of the national and various state races has never been more ludicrous either...
...Four years later, whenever I looked up, an anchorman was being handed a piece of paper under the table with the news that 20 per cent of the short people voted for Percy in Illinois, or 42 per cent of the tall people didn't...
...As it turned out, the timing of the calls only seemed to be noticeably different on public television's McNeill/ Lehrer Newshour...
...The voting age should be raised to 27...
...He was being a little bit overcautious, I thought, especially since the concession speech had been made already...
...That would make anybody nervous...
...Or questioning his ability to lead the American people...
...The job is at least as important as the Presidency...
...Roger Mudd and John Chancellor on NBC, for instance, were relaxed and informative, giving substantially the same story as Dan's a minute or two later or earlier...
...Dan appeared to be ignoring that his network—and the others—had made clear the whole thing was over while I was eating dinner...
...Keeping Cronkite in his den at so critical a time was another in a series of wrong decisions that should make Ed Joyce the Millard Fillmore of network news presidents...
...The newspapers had been saying for days that Rather wasn't feeling well...
...You know, a lot of people are starting to notice and talk about its anchor, Peter Jennings...
...For the first time m my history as a viewer of TV election coverage, I found myself not merely turning to but preferring ABC...
...One solution would be to have the TV coverage start at 11 p.m...
...At that moment four people started talking into his ear plug at once and he got a little unglued...
...Rather's real problem was being over-prepared...
...In his chili-weakened condition, Rather worked himself into a lather early on over how great it was that people could still vote in California...
...At first I thought he might simply be queasy about hosting the crucial Presidential selection show without Walter Cronkite...
...I think the studio should have been shut down after that...
...Last year he took over as anchor of ABC World News Tonight and still looked like a 26-year-old trying to act older...
...But at least the other news broadcasters appeared calm and collected...
...It is bad enough that anchormen are put in a morally untenable situation by their bosses' obsession with outpolling the pols...
...And not to worry, he was taking extra helpings of his wife's famous homemade Texas Prison Chili...
...They couldn't understand how the vote could be so decisively in his favor, although the pre-election samplings of public opinion had been indicating as much all along...
...It was, in fact, very boring everywhere else...
...Last election, the networks attacked the candidates for giving us leadership by the numbers...
...But I have been terribly unfair to him, as Ted Koppel of "Frightline" is fond of reminding me: "Jennings has been fighting his gorgeousness for years...
...He was tense and jumpy...
...Robert McNeill reported that Reagan led "243-13" at 11 :42p.m...
...In the New York market—which, as everybody knows, consists of all the opinion leaders—he beat Dan Rather's election night ratings...
...The nation's leading anchorman and odds-on favorite in the really important race of the evening —network news superiority—looked sick...
...They would have to use that also...
...I would like to see Connie Chung move to ABC News from NBC and wind up with the Brinkley sound...
...When informed that Jennings' accent is, in fact, Canadian, my neighbor's response was, "Why doesn't he go up there and analyze the Trudeau election...
...Rather's beating the drums for the glories of exit polls was plain hypocritical...
...This was kind of funny...
...It was the television broadcasters who were out of touch, I guess...
...political analyst Roger Ailes asked astutely...
...And Jennings is an Arabist in content, sort of a TV version of Lawrence of Arabia...
...Acting as a shill for television's rendering the West Coast vote virtually meaningless is not a good way to earn the public trust, Dan...
...But I have old-timers disease...
...Sometimes what they're wondering out loud is where a Brit gets off giving his opinions about American politics...
...What did that mean...
...Twenty years ago, when he arrived at ABC, he was 26 and trying to act older...
...Indeed, CBS' anchorman was no less shaky on his big night than Reagan was against Mondale on economics...
...New Jersey time) he came on the air for the start of his second hour and said," Good evening, everyone...
...Couldn't Moyers say anything positive about it, a pained Rather pressed on...
...Rather was also poor in another major area of the job: questioning his staff authorities...
...and he gets more air-time—without a bunch of journalists jumping up at the end to demand the release of his 1983 income tax forms...
...What about his wife's real estate investments...
...Congress can't stop it...
...That's just about the time all the people out there are coming home from their parties anyway...
...In any case, Cronkite reportedly had nothing to do with Dan being ill: He had the flu...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 20
