Talk is Cheapest
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television TALK IS CHEAPEST BY REUVEN FRANK N Next January H. Ross Perot will become America's first talk-show President. The campaign begun on CNN's Larry King Live, where he launched his...
...Informed and enlightened, the people would then speak, by touch-tone phone...
...It's not a matter of politics...
...The audience had begun tuning out even before there was cable television to turn to...
...As his spokesman observed in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, it is from these programs and not from print or broadcast journalism that America now gets its political information...
...Here Perot betrays himself as too high-tech by half, a nerd who understands hardware but not software...
...Or if, instead of economic experts in opposition, there were two transvestites and a pedophile...
...Perot's skillful use of both types of talk shows—to the delight of their practitioners—helped thrust him at the Presidency and finesse the conventional news outlets...
...In 1984, for Reagan's renomination, what lives in memory is Nancy Reagan on the podium waving at a huge TV screen showing Ronald Reagan in his hotel room, waving back—for 15 minutes...
...Hosts become millionaires and aspire to do documentaries...
...The President would host this TV show as Cabinet members and opposing experts debated an issue...
...That would get big ratings...
...Surely, there will be speeches...
...Then the talking circle widened...
...TV is ratings, baby, ratings...
...Nonsense, you say...
...There will be no fights over seating delegates...
...Eventually, even triple-exposure was not sufficient...
...There is the empty studio, except for a "host" questioning a famous or expert guest or batting the badinage with a "panel" of equals...
...Undaunted by Brokaw and CBS' Dan Rather on high, ABC's Peter Jennings chose a makeshift studio downstairs...
...It is very successful...
...from the years of the Democratic convention chairman, Speaker Sam Rayburn, turning off the opposition's microphones to Nixon hugging Sammy Davis Jr...
...It flowered when cable increased the amount of television time available exponentially, while the amount of money advertisers had to spend on the medium stayed the same...
...It has been widely reported that they inquired about the Rose Bowl...
...In the hall, huge loudspeakers played the Overture, 1812 as grown men and women cheered and whistled and applauded until their palms were feverish...
...There was a rush of imitators of 60 Minutes that still goes on...
...Failing such an arrangement, Perot might find he had made a Faustian bargain...
...Whatever your feelings about him, you have to grant that H. Ross Perot has made American politics interesting for the first time in decades...
...In 1956, for Dwight D. Eisenhower's re-nomination, the only news was NBC's senior commentator's exclusive that Eisenhower would dump Richard M. Nixon and make Harold E. Stassen his Vice President...
...The accountants had another epiphany: If nonfiction is cheaper than fiction, talk is the cheapest of all...
...There will be motivation and patriotism and exhortation to high purpose...
...it's a matter of television...
...He could be canceled at midseason...
...Without question there will be banners...
...The accountants galloped to the rescue...
...It increases their lecture fees, but that's another story...
...The expansion of cable television and the proliferation of stations independent of networks kept multiplying the hours of television that needed filling, but there was no money for more programs...
...To understand the '92 Presidential race, therefore, we must know about talk-show television...
...The campaign begun on CNN's Larry King Live, where he launched his noncandidacy and proposed government by call-in, will be complete...
...As costs rose, programs were played twice, so budgets were recovered from two sets of advertisements...
...It deals largely in sexual topics, the most conventional of which is rape...
...How would policy get made in these circumstances with Congress canceled...
...McNeil and Lehrer will be in the WNET studios on West 58th Street...
...If the networks only dared, they would not show up at all when the Republicans gather in Houston...
...The President couldn't answer back because his session with Walters was already in the can...
...Conventions are television's Old Man of the Sea: The networks know there is no reason to cover them yet are afraid to stop...
...today there are dozens, in some places hundreds...
...There could be a studio audience and phone-in questions...
...Nothing so terrifies a broadcaster as the prospect of sending out a signal that no one receives...
...For the Democrats' meeting in Madison Square Garden, all networks were allotted "sky-boxes" nine levels up, halfway between the convention floor and the nearest satellite...
...Perot has not only legitimized the genre but made it a no less vital part of our political process than exit polls, focus groups and the character issue...
...Perot's managers, meanwhile, aspire to their own version of a national convention...
...They had discovered that nonfiction, loosely called "news," is about half as expensive as "entertainment...
...And their tuning in remains unexplained, a wonderment...
...Perot himself has advocated using the "format" in one of his few specific proposals, an "electronic town hall...
...Bush was interviewed on ABC by Barbara Walters, who years earlier, on a similar assignment, had admonished Jimmy Carter, "Be wise with us...
...it could be a "profit center...
...It already does—every afternoon...
...This gave Perot time to go on NBC's Today and answer Bush before his words were aired...
...Through all this, the spirit of Oprah and Geraldo was never far away...
...Talk comes in two forms...
...What if the younger people were watching MTV and the older ones NFL football...
...The talk show without an audience depends mostly on the idiosyncrasies of the host...
...What if an electronic town hall were scheduled and nobody came...
...Public television will be on from 8 p.m...
...That is, it will use them from 8 to 10 when Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer switch to the convention floor for an occasional report, or to Tom Brokaw up above in his anchor booth...
...Those mastodons will lumber again for their allotted one week each with no function left but to get the parties free television time, and the networks will give them as little as they can get away with...
...Clinton was first on the morning programs...
...For example, it might still work if, instead of the Secretary of the Treasury explaining a new tax, Mel Brooks did the job in return for plugging his new movie...
...They might rent all the bowls, Cotton and Sugar and Orange and Tangerine and Kumquat...
...McLaughlin may be remembered as the Jesuit priest in the Nixon White House whose name was often paired with Rabbi Baruch Korff...
...The re-nomination of a sitting President is a surefire formula for such a disaster...
...Those days are long past, perhaps longer than we think...
...This needs rethinking...
...Of course, TV convention coverage has had some great moments, from the Robert A. Taft-Eisenhower battle at the Republican convention of 1952 to Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago and the entire Cook County delegation being expelled from the Democratic convention 20 years later...
...The networks are bound to carry it live...
...There is also talk of meetings in many places, united by television...
...Shortly there will be at least one network magazine on the air every night of the week, a tribute not to the vigorous reporting of 60 Minutes but to its making money...
...There will be cheering, and there may actually be tears...
...It is still exclusive...
...And then what...
...Nevertheless, although the usual audience for Larry King Live is tiny by network standards, enough people were watching last February 20 to form a movement?to conglobulate into 50 state organizations, rent offices, print bumper stickers, organize petition signings, and confound the world with the Perot phenomenon...
...Information was no longer broadcasting's obligation...
...We tend to forget that a decade ago a TV set received five or six signals...
...Certainly, there will be celebrities...
...John McLaughlin assembles reporters who as a condition of employment scream or shout, suffer insults, and cavort in a way they would be embarrassed to at home...
...That's more people than afterward claimed they were in Wrigley Field to see Babe Ruth point to the outfield wall...
...Later they were sold to individual stations as well, to run with still another set of ads...
...The basic idea was conceived in penury and born of necessity...
...Will people watch...
...Will you...
...news was made, outcomes were in doubt...
...As has been the practice in that ancient mode, Walters' interview of Bush was released to the newspapers in advance of broadcast...
...Perhaps...
...That makes for strange picture angles but is useful for a baldness census...
...George Bush is the last President who had to be told about talk shows...
...He would pre-empt the Constitution's representative democracy and have the citizenry vote directly on important matters, like Athenians gathering in the agora...
...Why do distinguished journalists allow themselves to be thus treated and exhibited...
...to 11 p.m...
...The experience was so enchanting that both arranged to buy network time for their own call-in shows—but they realized how well they were doing as "guests" on someone else's, at no cost to themselves, and canceled the purchases...
...C-Span and CNN will again carry everything...
...Soon Bill Clinton went on the show, and George Bush's inner council began debating whether to invite an invitation...
...Be good to us...
...It is, however, unlikely he can do the same for the national conventions...
...Not having staff reporters, it will use NBC's...
...Perot followed...
...Until they started earning less than they invested, the three established networks, in their cost-plus way, dominated TV with expensive, star-studded vaudeville and light fiction...
...And there is the studio with an audience that applauds, gasps and adds questions and comments...
...Since 1952, no convention has needed more than one roll-call vote to pick its candidate for President...
...This second type requires a flamboyant host like Phil Donahue or Oprah Winfrey or Geraldo Rivera...
...After 60 Minutes and some other "magazines" had been going quietly about their craft for years, it was suddenly announced that 60 Minutes was profitable...
...Further, Perot's CNN appearance that night, besides setting him on the road to the Presidency, gave status to Larry King Live...
...Journalism, with its follow-up questions, has been leapfrogged by Donahue and Sally Jessy and Sonya and Regis and Kathie Lee and Joan Rivers and Maury Povich and Montel Williams—the whole gaboisie...
...There were, it is true, some appearances of the traditional sort...
...Gavel-to-gavel coverage became three hours a night in 1984, and this year the commercial networks have each scheduled one hour a night...
...Once, indeed, things happened at these quadrennial gatherings...
...no great issues of our time will be contested on the convention floor, as civil rights and the Vietnam War were in the '60s...
...This marked the end of innocence for all of network news...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
