On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television LET'S END POLITICAL ADS ON TV BY REUVEN FRANK In theory, the United States elects a President every four years. In fact, the United States is always electing a President. Soon after...
...No, television cannot be blamed for its effectiveness...
...Thus pundits and scholars are once again tumbling over each other like puppies from a basket to devise new recipes for making the exercise "meaningful...
...The Court has ruled on several occasions, for reasons I personally find illogical, that broadcasting is not entitled to full First Amendment protection...
...For example, perhaps a law could be passed forbidding political advertising on television...
...Somehow...
...The solution must lie elsewhere...
...Their editors have already begun engaging in an endless promenade of fora and symposia, some shared with the previously mentioned academics, to critique media coverage of the 1996 campaign...
...High-minded recommendations ensued...
...The amendment was invoked by tobacco companies when Congress banned cigarette advertising from radio and television, but the ban was sustained...
...Money would be forthcoming anyway, since donors have their own reasons for making political donations...
...and Jack Kemp was re-evaluating...
...Money buys creativity, and creativity has confounded every attempt at restricting campaign financing...
...True, they are not yet comparing the contest in 2000 with any of those that preceded it, or charting the diminishing length of printed and broadcast quotations from candidates as it approaches zero...
...A campaign needs all of these, but none of them requires the sums, or has the potential for harm, of television advertising...
...The pressure for new candidates to raise war chests, and for elected officials to raise re-election campaign funds, would not be eliminated, only diminished...
...Stump speeches, policy papers and other bids for attention received neither column space nor airtime...
...Furthermore, the Supreme Court has limited the government's ability to effectively control money spent on elections by ruling that such control violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech...
...What mattered, of course, was that the candidates did as much as they were willing to do, and no one could make them do what they didn't want to—a reality invariably ignored by all proposals to improve the system...
...media baron Rupert Murdoch floated the name of his liegeman, New York Governor George Pataki, as a GOP contender...
...The Washington News Coven will spend the interim even more actively, composing Sunday Op-Ed pieces, giving overpaid lectures and writing campaign histories that emphasize the telling detail, the revealing aside, the defining moment, the endearing inconsistency...
...If cigarette advertising can be forbidden, why not political advertising...
...As for the First Amendment, it may not apply...
...We overreported who was winning and ignored what they stood for...
...We will improve...
...We did poorly," the editors humbly confessed...
...It is hard to believe that a single voter was enlightened or one vote affected...
...Without television advertising, the candidates' costs would have been lower, their need to raise funds less pressing, the tone of their campaigns more civilized...
...That gave rise to the usual yammer about how the three nonevents weren't really debates at all, as though fidelity to dictionary definition mattered...
...The debates were not any better, because neither candidate engaged the other...
...Senator must raise each day of his six-year term to be returned to office, or of the Nixon Administration officials sent to jail for violating the election financing rules during Watergate, or of how the rules subsequently enacted to prevent a repetition were ingeniously made ineffective...
...While we may never have a precise figure, television commercial time alone accounted for well over half the total $800 million estimated cost of the Presidential campaign...
...Its low level received national attention, but few cited its price: a combined total of about $15 million...
...What is called "soft money," paid to parties rather than candidates, was only this year's answer to this year's inadequate solution...
...Half of the Garden State watches New York stations, the other half Philadelphia stations...
...It could be spent on more focus groups, mailings, telephone banks, and newspaper advertising...
...The most common one would have office seekers appear together alone, so they might question each other, challenge each other's errors of fact and dogma—even if that means descending into a slanging match (although no one says that in quite those words...
...Uniquely among the states, New Jersey has no major commercial television station...
...Imagine trying to convey Willie Horton in a revolving door—President George Bush's ad attacking the prison furlough policy of his challenger, Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis—among the department store ads in your newspaper...
...Maybe it will have a greater impact than the horror stories we have heard of how much money a newly elected U.S...
...They chose, unfortunately, to respond with anthologies of bumper stickers...
...But, equally innocently, it is the reason it must give up political revenue...
...Advertisers, in this case candidates, pay rates set by the size of the viewer base, despite their trying to reach only a fraction of that audience...
...That's why the Senate race between two Congressmen, Republican Dick Zimmer and Democrat Bob Torricelli, was one of the dirtiest, most expensive in the country...
...Perhaps boxing promoter Don King's advice could be enlisted to enliven the process...
...But in 1996 as in the past, reports of the fundraising scandals failed to mention that no one pocketed that money...
...We will improve...
...Even President Clinton, typically trying to pre-empt their ground, brought it up four days after his victory at his first formal press conference in 10 months...
...newspapers, quoting anonymous sources, began naming Vice President Al Gore's possible rivals for the Democratic nomination in the year 2000...
...Could they have reached their voters without television commercials...
...The goal of pure, unfettered, theoretical democracy was not attained...
...And increasingly, election expenses are the cost of television commercials...
...After '92, as after every recent election, a miasma of remorse hung heavily over corresponding confabulations...
...Regrettably, when the issue surfaced this year it was tainted with anti-Asian jingoism...
...Horserace" reporting, if not entirely eschewed, was toned down...
...The major candidates were afforded the opportunity to speak individually to the voters via network television in an atmosphere of sobriety and consequence, unmediated by journalists...
...Consider the 1996 New Jersey Senate race to replace the retiring Bill Bradley...
...Still, the public got its strongest lesson yet that the worst threat to a democratic system is the cost of getting elected, and re-elected...
...But it is as New Jersey as the New York Giants football team, which plays its "home" games in the Meadowlands, not far from Channel 9's studios and transmitter...
...It was all so self-consciously noble, its aura made you sneeze...
...We sold our souls to be interesting and ignored our duty to be important...
...Candidates' stands on issues were conscientiously set forth, except in states where local newspapers and TV stations ordained that the positions of politicians were less important than the public's concerns...
...And 1996 was indeed different...
...Soon after Election Day, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Republican flat-taxer Steve Forbes each announced plans to visit Iowa and New Hampshire...
...At those prices, candidates need ads that hit hard...
...The faculty of the Institute for Advanced Sound Bites hasn't been stowed away for a quadrennium of slumber either...
...It is a danger to our national health...
...What agitated the people in those areas was elicited in focus groups and open meetings, and only those issues were treated as newsworthy...
...That would eliminate the biggest campaign expense, and with it the necessity for huge funds...
...Negative" political advertising—that is, commercials that are not about the candidate but about his opponent—would not be eliminated either...
...The topic sure to dominate those assemblies and colloquia unto the year 2000, however, is campaign finance...
...But they have four more years of conferences to fly to, seminars to conduct, books to publish, and evening appearances to make on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer...
...Negative ads hit hardest...
...We will improve...
...In short, the formula for excellence cooked up during the last four years failed...
...Not only were untruths unmasked, but partial truths were analyzed in almost stupefying detail and put in proper context...
...it went for election expenses...
...Even if the Court reconsiders its ruling, as some prominent scholars have asked, experience does not encourage optimism...
...it is as old as the Republic...
...When Election Day finally arrived it drew proportionately the lowest turnout since Calvin Coolidge defeated John N. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in 1924—and the networks' election night programs fared similarly...
...It will also generate many Congressional hearings as the Republican losers try to rinse the salted wounds of the Presidential campaign...
...WWOR-TV, Channel 9, is physically in Secaucus, New Jersey, because in applying for the WWOR-TV, New York, license that had been lifted by the FCC on the grounds of unethical commercial conduct, the successful bidder promised to move it there...
...Television spots were assiduously examined for accuracy and probity during both the primary and general election campaigns...
...Caps and other limits on political donations can be made to melt away if clever political operatives put their minds to it...
...Well, their predecessors did not so long ago...
...But it would lose what is far and away its most effective platform...
...It is, innocently, the source of its wealth...
...Problems would remain, but they would be fewer...
...Amateurs though they may be in this field, these experts know that television, like all narrative, needs a little conflict to be interesting...
Vol. 79 • November 1996 • No. 8
