On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television THE TRIUMPH OF SLEAZE BY REUVEN FRANK PRECISELY on schedule, as they always have right after Election Day, news bigwigs from broadcasting and print began gathering to tell each...
...They had to refuse commercials from seekers of state and municipal posts because the law requires them to give priority to Federal level candidates...
...Yet this may be step one in showing how it is easier to pass a balanced budget amendment than to balance the budget...
...If Rush Limbaugh let up, he would ruin his ratings...
...it was the advertising, especially on television and radio...
...He did talk an awful lot during the nine hours of the series...
...This apparently applies as well to candidates' statements used in straight news coverage, what spin doctors like James Carville and Ed Rollins dismiss as "free media...
...Moreover, the media may be less guilty than they look...
...Such are the auspices under which the 104th Congress of the United States assumes power...
...All present creditedhimwithbeing their mentor...
...What the heck, it works for him...
...He did, however, stay on in Washington and accept work as a lobbyist...
...Not only that...
...I got tired of hearing how Mario Cuomo should be my role model," the Senator said...
...They and whoever was speaking were the only ones standing in that large Baltimore room...
...Others say that it is not living up to its mandate, that it has become too bland, that it does not observe high standards, that it runs too many cooking shows...
...For example, South Dakota's Larry Pressler, the new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, really is unhappy with all the networks...
...The whole attack is reminiscent of the time 10 years ago when, as a stunt, Senator Jesse Helms had his fund-raisers solicit money to buy CBS...
...Huntley was good at holding a straight face...
...THE AIR at the meeting crackled with hostility toward the press...
...At one of the first of these events, a two-day seminar at Harvard, an important and accomplished television reporter accused her colleagues in all the media of undermining the institutions that support American civilization...
...I found the series skillfully done, and its subject a relief from the cliched middle-class life of most situation comedies...
...Nevertheless, he talked exclusively about baseball-not about politics, or welfare, or abortion, or the death penalty, or other issues he is known for...
...It seemed a bit much even as she said it, but the postelection mewling of journalists is becoming part of our system of government...
...If there is general agreementthat 1994 saw the meanest, sleaziest, most fatuous, least relevant political campaign anyone remembers, it is partly because memory is short...
...One twentieth of 1 per cent of the U.S...
...That's the law...
...In no other year has either made as much money from political spots...
...That is one seventh of 1 per cent of the annual Federal deficit...
...But none of these is the reason why the incoming Congressional leadership wants to deny it Federal money...
...Onc-SPAN you could see the huddle of reporters, isolated in a far corner, furiously taking notes...
...Perhaps Pressler believes that talking about baseball is inherently liberal...
...His problem is that ABC, CBS and NBC receive no public funds...
...That would leave 99.85 per cent of the deficit to go before reaching a balanced budget...
...But destroying PBS is lots easier than buying CBS, so that is the new agenda...
...Both will top their '93 income by up to 25 per cent...
...I even praised the courage of the program executives who renewed it for a second season after the first one had achieved only mediocre ratings...
...It is to weep...
...On Television THE TRIUMPH OF SLEAZE BY REUVEN FRANK PRECISELY on schedule, as they always have right after Election Day, news bigwigs from broadcasting and print began gathering to tell each other they had done a terrible job covering the campaign and promise to do better next time...
...Section 312-A(7) of the Communications Act says "repeated or willful failure to allow reasonable access to, or permit the purchase of reasonable amounts of time for campaigns for Federal office" can be the basis for revoking a broadcaster's license...
...he is left with taking everything out on public broadcasting...
...A legislator said that while Huntley's reporting might not be slanted, his eyebrows showed what he truly believed...
...Since there was no Presidential contest, little went to the networks...
...He, too, was tagged a liberal...
...And the only people in a position to change it are the very Congressmen who owe their election to those terrible ads...
...Managers are terrified absentee owners will expect bigger profits in '95, when there are no Congressional elections...
...If you saw the baseball series on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), you remember how Cuomo, then the admittedly liberal Governor of New York State, talked about baseball, his life in baseball, the poetry of baseball, the game as symbol...
...Section 315-A of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, stipulates that a licensee-that is, every radio and TV station-shall afford "equal opportunities" to anyone running for Federal office, and "shall have no power of censorship...
...Some stations ran out of time to sell...
...It is also a sixth of what it costs to keep public radio and TV on the air, but a vital sixth, without which the enterprise might go under...
...Gingrich is not alone in questioning taxpayer support for American public broadcasting...
...No matter that it contains blatant falsehoods about the candidate's opponent, takes credit where none is due, casts any of the many scatological aspersions that do not violate the obscenity statutes, or is otherwise disgusting...
...The answer is, it's against the law...
...Besides the new Congressmen, among those at the meeting who credited Limbaugh with turning public opinion toward the kind of Republicanism that is called "conservative" these days were several far from insignificant thinkers like former Secretary of Education William Bennett, now a best-selling author, and Vin Weber, who quit Congress after a dozen or so not undistinguished years because he couldn't stand the system, the compromising, the frustration...
...No one provided them with tapes or transcripts, or even seats...
...Local radio and television stations raked in practically the entire sum...
...Potential donors were enticed with the prospect of "becoming Dan Rather's boss...
...Mario Cuomo always talks a lot...
...Still, sleaze is in such bad odor that people say they want the content of political advertising controlled...
...In other words, if you refuse a Congressional candidate's commercial because you can make more money selling perfume or snow tires, you could be put out of business...
...I apologize to anyone who might have been misled into following my recommendation...
...MEA CULPA: Recently I recommended, somewhat extravagantly, an NBC comedy series starring John Larroquette as the night manager of the bus station in a lowly part of town, and featuring the downtrodden denizens of the netherworld who are his daily companions...
...For the next two years it will be hard to keep a straight face...
...This election, it wasn't the news reporting that was so bad...
...About one in 10 of its members are Republican freshmen who, elevating a section of the interstate highway system to a place in the political pantheon, met "outside the Beltway" in Baltimore to hear the wisdom of Rush Limbaugh...
...High on their menu of priorities, and on Newt Gingrich's, is eliminating Federal funds for public broadcasting...
...Much of the focus has shifted from the bus station to the apartment house...
...Like so many others, NBC has concluded there is no profit in poverty...
...budget goes to public radio and television...
...Editorial writers and poll respondents are asking the same question: If the Federal Trade Commission can stop you from disseminating misleading advertising about your manufactured product, and the Food and Drug Administration can put you in jail if you market medicine it has not approved, why can't political advertising be held to the same standards as laundry soap and headache pills...
...Well, you have to start somewhere...
...Journalists think of themselves as working hard to achieve responsible coverage of the issues in a political campaign, while the consultants, at least since the time of Mike Deaver, view their work as no more than "free media...
...For the show's second season more than Larroquette's hair has been styled...
...Limbaugh advised them not to get co-opted into the wily social atmosphere of the national capital, not to be seduced by glamorous female reporters who "bat their eyes," not to let their anger cool, not to deviate from targeting the poor, from their contempt for the foreign-born-in short, to hold fast to the qualities that brought them to power...
...Public radio and television give a liberal slant to their news, Pressler complained recently, citing even Ken Burns' TV series on the history of baseball...
...Advertising costs for '94 totaled $590 million, with more than half a billion going to broadcasting...
...Or that the producers should have looked for a Republican governor who as a boy had yearned to play pro ball, and actually spent a year in the minor leagues...
...Gingrich's gaggle, the fledgling Republican Congressmen bent on setting a new tone, sat at dinner tables...
...The show is now simply another middle-class sitcom, better than some, not as good as several...
...Except for acting under the criminal provisions against broadcasting obscenity- and that is purely theoretical, because it has never been tested-station executives dare not touch a word of a political ad...
...Gingrich wants to "zero out" the money for its funding arm, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...he has moved into an upscale apartment that strains credulity, with a girlfriend across the hall...
...He, too, was accused by angry politicians-and citizens-of instigatingthe events he reported...
...He issued a formal statement rejecting responsibility for his eyebrows...
...The most popular news broadcaster in the United States a few decades back was my friend Chet Huntley...
Vol. 77 • November 1994 • No. 11
