On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
OnTelevision MISSING THE STORY BY REUVEN FRANK TELEVISION is fame. Fame is fleeting. When this year's record snows finally melted in the Northeast, they washed away hours of video images of Phil...
...But not, as Willy Loman might have pointed out, necessarily well-liked...
...Money buys time...
...It will be the biggest news out of San Diego, perhaps the only news...
...Buchanan showed the media that the way Americans have to feed and house and educate their families nowadays is new...
...The jealous states therefore passed laws to move up their contests...
...If that isn't news, it will have to do until the real thing comes along...
...The would-be White House occupants put on their television makeup before breakfast and spoke to the cameras all day long...
...Grateful TV chieftains will thank their lucky stars that it is all happening in the season of repeats, of low Nielsen ratings and few viewers—and after the Olympics...
...After all, journalists themselves have been experiencing the same job problems as auto workers...
...Steve Forbes learned that happiness is not the only thing money cannot buy...
...They had read the adjective in Newsweek...
...What did this turn of events prove about the role of television in the modern primary campaign...
...The networks will carry at least one hour of each of the conventions' four nights, and possibly more of the Republican gathering because it may end up in brawl...
...Television coverage of the primaries, however, did achieve the demise of what was less than charmingly called retail politics...
...Remarkably, they didn't report this to the world as news...
...Suddenly, though...
...Once journalists agreed he would not get the nomination, perhaps they should have hired their former colleague to tell them what the news is...
...There may have been one other contribution the 1996 primary season made to the history of American politics: Senator Dole's blunt, characteristically honest and ultimately damaging admission, after his New Hampshire defeat, that he had not expected job loss and job security to be an issue...
...They believed it because television said so...
...There will be speculation about Dole's choice for the Vice Presidential nomination...
...Meanwhile W. Edwards Deming, the late quality control guru, was advocating worker participation in decisions to increase productivity...
...News is supposed to be about what's changed, what's new...
...Something out there had eluded the reporters and pundits...
...Not West Point cadets...
...Robert Reich, not yet Secretary of Labor, was saying the changing economy needed retraining schemes...
...gave the process an air of excitement, of doubtful outcome, of great forces striving...
...Those were the weeks when many people believed there was a question about who would be the Republican candidate for President in November...
...His '96 primary theme fastened on the insecurity and trepidation of American workers and low-level managers in the age of globalization, restructuring and downsizing...
...Assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, Dole will almost certainly announce his choice before the convention starts, as Walter Mondale did in 1984, and thereby rob the media, especially television, of their last chance at a valid convention news story...
...More than a decade has passed since reporters began telling each other how TV news was hiring for months instead of years, at lower pay, with fewer benefits...
...Even mighty California, irked that by its primary date a candidate had almost always been effectively chosen, rendering its mighty voting power moot, joined the parade...
...Lamar Alexander joined them in the same footnote...
...Yet he was not the only one surprised when Pat Buchanan beat him in New Hampshire by appealing to the anger, fear and pessimism of the middle class, and to blue collar rage and frustration...
...The only one left will be whether Buchanan gets to speak in prime time...
...TV time makes you well-known...
...He will rally the troops of the Right to his standard with his opposition to abortion, any and all, whatever the circumstances...
...Journalists can make mistakes...
...The electronic and print media will commission many public opinion polls...
...But where were the news media during 20 years of corporate downsizing, of growing middle-class fear and anger...
...Legislatures of small states envied the attention and presumed tourist trade New Hampshire got every four years from its historic role—since 1952, that is—as host of what mellifluous broadcast voices never failed to identify as the "first-in-the-nation" (pronounced as one word) primary...
...For a time, a short time, really a matter of weeks, these men had seemed so important, so interesting, so vital to what was going on in the country, to the future...
...Fair enough...
...Although the press, too, made fun of Dole, it was no less surprised than he...
...Retraining company employees losing, or about to lose, jobs...
...When this year's record snows finally melted in the Northeast, they washed away hours of video images of Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander...
...Following New Hampshire—well, better late than never—they sprang into action...
...BOTH PARTIES' conventions are in August...
...The lag, theoretically a dead space in Presidential politics, is the longest we have known...
...From Arianna Huffington to David Letterman, they scoffed at Dole's wan confession about being blindsided when the election began to revolve around jobs and the economy...
...Dole clearly meant that he had not expected jobs to be an issue among Republicans, or in their primary...
...Not accountants...
...Nevertheless, he sounded foolish, and only his immediate swift march to winning the nomination kept his statement from being the gaffe that could have defeated him...
...How are they influenced by the issues...
...The primary season, with only the GOP nomination at stake, ended earlier than ever in recent history...
...It will take time to get from hindsight to history and discover the answer...
...Now he is the big gun to Dole's right, ready to dominate news attention again at this year's convention...
...So did Phil Gramm, who had launched his bid the previous autumn announcing that his campaign had raised more of it than anyone else's...
...Nor were Deming and Reich lone voices...
...Bob Dole was the nominee...
...they were merely two among many warning that the economy was changing...
...The results will be reported as they are gathered, analyzed as they are reported, then picked apart on panel shows by journalists talking to each other...
...The coverage, the cameras' omnipresence in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in Louisiana?does anyone still remember Louisiana...
...Thanks in large part to his chosen issue, he alone among Dole's stronger opponents for the nomination did not drop out of sight after winning a primary or two...
...Dutifully, reporters from all the media trod on each others' feet trying to keep up with the hectic schedule that emerged...
...This brought extraordinary attention to his low-budget campaign, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire...
...Retraining whom...
...Which, for a while, seemed to be the case, or was made to seem to be...
...In fact we already are...
...They will delve into the attitudes, preferably the shifting attitudes, of voters categorized by age, by wealth, by literacy, by place of birth, by place of residence, by eye and hair color: How do they regard the candidates...
...That is very late...
...But the audience was deaf, and it included most of the press...
...Millions of dollars worth of advanced electronic equipment, hundreds of skilled technicians and sophisticated journalists will be deployed...
...New Hampshire Yankees were accustomed to having the big names from Washington join them in the diner for breakfast or at church for supper...
...Or perhaps it was just a special effect of the circumstances...
...Newspapers and network news divisions have been downsizing alongside steel-makers and telephone companies...
...Or they had known about it, but not considered it news...
...We can expect to hear and see a lot about it...
...This year more than in the past they saw their candidates, if at all, from behind a wall of several dozen TV cameras, crews and reporters...
...But for a brief period the prospect of an ongoing battle, with no resolution until the delegates vote in San Diego in August, was real enough to inspire at least one of the network news divisions to plan carefully and seriously for an hour-long documentary on brokered conventions...
...For what could be sweeter than if it turned out, indeed, that they were covering a horse race...
...In 1992, he proclaimed a cultural war of Republicans against Republicans at the GOP's national convention in Houston...
...What Buchanan talked about should have been news, if not 20 years ago then 10...
...Patrick J. Buchanan, in sharp contrast, danced on the other side of the coin...
...Even those you recognize from television roundtables...
...The long-cherished idea in Iowa was that each active party member, before committing his vote in a caucus, would come to know the candidates?not by shaking their hands or asking for their autographs or even New Age hugs, but by asking questions and getting answers...
...This time anyway, he knew and they didn't...
...The process itself had been distorted, revised, amended, all for television...
...Then they disappeared from the newscasts, from the newspapers, from the punditry, from the jokes of late night comedians...
...Most of it will be uninformed, and in the crassest terms of vote-getting over principles...
...But Buchanan has apparently left the jobs issue to melt with the snows of New Hampshire...
...On television Dole's words, like Senator Edmund S. Muskie's tears in front of the Manchester Union-Leader building a quarter of a century ago, seemed much worse than they actually were...
...There was a major cover story in Newsweek about the companies with the biggest layoffs, another in Business Week about downsizing and global competition, and a seven-day, book-length New York Times series that must have been in the works for months but was apparently forced into print, ready or not, by the Buchanan vote...
...and that the old middle-class optimism has waned...
...Not much...
...And more was coming...
Vol. 79 • January 1996 • No. 1
