LIVE FROM CAPITOL HILL IT'S...
Hess, Stephen
LIVE FROM CAPITOL HILL IT'S... PICKING COMMITTEES IN THE BLOW-DRIED AGE by Stephen Hess When most of us think about why a senator chooses to serve on one committee or another, a variety...
...and that's a different matter entirely...
...National media potential counts heavily for some senators when they choose committee assignments...
...Seventyfour cameras covered Energy Committee meetings during the oil crisis in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was trying to persuade America that conservation was "the moral equivalent of war...
...All of the Ethics Committee's cameras focused on two cases: Senator Herman Talmadge's financial improprieties (1979) and Harrison Williams's abscam troubles (1980 and 1981...
...Of course, these rankings do not reflect the ebb and flow of network attention over time...
...Perhaps the senator wants to pursue a subject that has always interested him...
...A chairman of the Environment and Public Works committee will have considerable power within the Senate but few mentions on the evening news...
...But senators who want to move into the national spotlight have to adjust their sights...
...The local media have reporters in Washington to make sure that actions that directly affect Main Street are covered also...
...Affairs, and Judiciary...
...In recent years, Judiciary repeatedly has made news because •of its jurisdiction over civil rights bills, anti-crime legislation (including such questions as the death penalty and the insanity defense), proposed constitutional amendments (the equal rights amendment, school prayer, abortion), and immigration reform...
...Chairman John McClellan's examination of labor racketeering, with Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel, was well covered between 1957 and 1959...
...senators choose the committees they do: where you sit determines how often you will be photographed...
...Kefauver's cornmittee hearings even won an Emmy...
...That undoubtedly helped him in his successful bid to become majority leader and may strengthen his chances of winning the presidential nomination...
...not one network camera found its way into a hearing during the five and a half years surveyed...
...Other committee assignments guarantee the respect of campaign-contributing PACS...
...peers in mentions on network television news during 1973-1974...
...Other familiar faces also have chosen their committees wisely...
...I should note, too, that these figures understate its present popularity...
...Consider an article by Rick Atkinson and Walter Pincus that appeared on the front page of the The Washington Post on May 4, 1984, under the headline, "Pentagon Lists Budget Cuts": In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, [Defense Secretary Caspar] Weinberger made no effort to hide his regret at the cuts, and when Senator J. James Exon asked where further cuts could be made...
...In spite of the flurries of attention accorded such environmental stories as Three Mile Island and Love Canal, the Environment and Public Works Committee got only 60 cameras...
...Among those who do not belong to the networks' top eight committees are David Boren, Wendell Ford, Chic Hecht, John Melcher, David Pryor, and Malcolm Wallop...
...since 1953, its members have included Robert A. Taft, William Knowland, Hubert Humphrey, Frank Church, Stuart Symington, Eugene McCarthy, Edmund Muskie, George McGovern, Howard Baker, John Glenn, Alan Cranston, and John E Kennedy...
...Its importance has grown along with the federal deficit...
...Daniel Inouye, who, during one witness's testimony, made the mistake of muttering into an open mike, "What a liar...
...And while Jennings Randolph may not have been a regular on the network news, the public works projects he brought home to West Virginia certainly got the local media attention that helped him stay in Congress for 52 years...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, who examined the problem of poverty as a Harvard professor, now sits on the subcommittee on Social Security and Income Maintenance Programs...
...It may be a sad comment on our times that Ethics, with 82 cameras, is more than halfway down the list of 21 committees...
...None of this quiet, behind-the-scenes stuff that Jennings Randolph prefers...
...and Joseph Montoya, whose questions, Art Buchwald observed, provided an opportunity for viewers to run to the bathroom...
...Foreign Relations has traditionally been the prime Senate incubator of presidential aspirants...
...When Bob• Dole switched from Agriculture to Finance —a move that was not popular with Kansas farmers— he became more nationally newsworthy...
...The next best place for a senator to get noticed is Judiciary (252 cameras...
...In the past, ambitious Senate investigations garnered enormous publicity...
...Or perhaps a senator wants to be sure his state has a voice in a certain area that is vital to its economy...
...Writing in these pages ("How to Make the Front Page," October 1978), Joseph Nocera observed that Randolph "is a master grantsman for West Virginia, creating dams where there was only river...
...Photographs of these senators are available on request from their offices...
...Democratic presidential nomination largely because of his 1951 chairmanship of a committee investigating organized crime...
...Orrin Hatch is chairman of Labor and of the Constitution subcommittee of Judiciary and serves on Budget and the Select Committee...
...Created in 1974, the Budget Committee was barely noticed by cameras until Ronald Reagan and David Stockman launched their budget-cutting crusade in 1981...
...Howard Metzenbaum's committees are Budget, Energy, Judiciary, and Labor...
...But Senator Carl Levin told Weinberger, `You come up here saying every year that if we cut one dollar...
...But] to get great press you have to create news...
...Yet after the 1950s only a few hearings garnered publicity on this scale...
...In 1983 and 1984, Biden was a member of the three most televised committees—Foreign Relations, Judiciary (where he was the ranking Democrat), and Budget—as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence...
...When a committee makes news, its members make news...
...Similarly, more than half of the cameras that came to the Rules Committee were there in 1981, during deliberation over an issue of particular interest to the networks: whether there should be TV coverage of the Senate floor...
...Take Jennings Randolph, who headed the committee (then known as Public Works) until the Republicans gained control of the Senate...
...Indian Affairs ranked dead last...
...Senators in the National Media...
...This hearing was also covered by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and C-SPAN...
...Viewers in more than 47 million homes became fascinated by the personalities of the senators doing the questioning—Chairman Sam Ervin, the country philosopher from Harvard Law whose eyebrows danced while he grilled the witnesses...
...PICKING COMMITTEES IN THE BLOW-DRIED AGE by Stephen Hess When most of us think about why a senator chooses to serve on one committee or another, a variety of motives come to mind...
...When I asked Joseph Biden what he felt accounted for his newsworthiness, he replied without hesitation, "It's the committees, of course...
...But there is another important reason why Stephen Hess is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution...
...Estes Kefauver, for example, became a contender for the 1952...
...Such investigations aroused anxieties during the early days of television that Senate committee rooms would become home-screen circuses...
...in subsequent years the coverage fell sharply...
...Media opportunities like those provided by Watergate are rare, however...
...The most prominent exception was the Watergate hearings during the summer of 1973...
...Sitting on a committee ignored by the national press corps does not necessarily mean you won't get press coverage...
...1986 The Brookings Institution...
...This article is adapted from his book, The Ultimate Insiders: U.S...
...Senator Sam Nunn, a Senate leader on defense matters,pulled him up short on that issue...
...Howard Baker, forever asking "what the president knew and when did he know it," who suddenly pulled ahead of Edward Kennedy in a Harris poll trial heat for president...
...The Army-McCarthy hearings were the riveting drama of the 1954 television season and helped cause McCarthy's censure by the Senate...
...Senator John W. Warner, a former Navy secretary, questioned the cut of an attack submarine...
...Conversely, less familiar faces may owe their national obscurity in part to the fact that they don't sit on the heavily televised committees...
...The fastest rising seat of influence in terms of media attention—with 156 cameras, now in third place—is the Budget Committee...
...The man who succeeded him as chairman, Robert Stafford, enjoyed somewhat higher visibility, but still ranked only fifty-third in 1983...
...It is followed by a perennial favorite of the press corps, the Governmental Affairs Committee (152 cameras), once known as Government Operations, which has broad authority to investigate (but not legislate) and is therefore especially involved in finding waste and malfeasance in the president's agencies...
...Getting on the right committees is crucial to any senator who wants to get the attention of the Washington press corps—especially the television networks...
...Thus Jesse Helms, the Republican from North Carolina, chose in 1985 to retain the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee to better defend his state's tobacco farmers rather than become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee...
...An inspection of the worksheets kept by the Senate radio and television gallery shows that between February 1979 and June 1984 the best committee for the media hound to be on was Foreign Relations, covered by 522 network cameras...
...TV stardom for a senator these days means a few seconds on the network news—but that may be enough to affect a senator's choice of committee assignments...
...Randolph ranked eighty-second among his...
...The numbers bear out Nocera's assessment...
...and Charles Mathias is on Rules (chairman), Foreign Relations, Governmental...
...Some of its power has ebbed—if only because we've kept out of a full-fledged war during the past decade—but Foreign Relations still remains the locus of congressional activity in the area that Washington journalism finds most newsworthy...
Vol. 18 • June 1986 • No. 5
