BATTLE OF THE NETWORK DOLTS
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Battle of the Network Dolts by Andrew Ferguson San Diego SINCE THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION was supposed to be the most sophisticated television production in political history, you’d think the...
...He’s trying to show simplicity and the common touch, Bernie,” Schneider reported professorially...
...At every turn the TV coverage of the convention showed their terror at being taken for chumps and shills—mere patsies of the vast and sinister Republican public-relations apparatus...
...You got moments like Michel McQueen’s ABC interview Tuesday night with a Buchanan delegate, which I reprint in its entirety: McQueen: You’re unhappy that Buchanan won’t speak tonight, isn’t that right...
...That Schneider can comment on anything...
...Infomercial” was the clich...
...of the hour, with “highly scripted” finishing a close second...
...Carmen Miranda never looked this silly...
...Hence the odd spectacle of TV stars warning their TV audience that the TV show it was watching was “made for TV...
...Thanks so much for sharing...
...Peter...
...Finally, there were those TV moments for which all Republicans live—examples of arrant Liberal Media Bias...
...Bob Dole’s acceptance speech, as is customary nowadays, was introduced by a brief video clip summarizing his life (“The Man from Hopeless,” you might call it...
...In doing so, the hacks hope to place the news in perspective...
...Peter,” Greenfield responded from beneath his headset, “they want us to get that Bob Dole is Russell, Kansas . . . ” and so on for another half-minute...
...Then it was back to Bernie Shaw in the booth...
...McQueen: Mm-hmm...
...The Media Research Center monitored the leftward tilt with its customary vigilance...
...And so the TV people made sure that what you saw on TV was very distant from the “reality on the floor...
...And the rest...
...By tradition, conventions are filled with people wearing silly hats, but this year those people were network correspondents...
...Why not just go all the way and wear a lampshade...
...And you know what...
...If the Republicans were aggressively packaging their convention, the networks one-upped them by packaging the packaging...
...At last, in the final seconds, Dan Rather cut to the video...
...When Dole finally appeared in the flesh (very tanned), he made his way to the podium across the convention floor, greeting delegates as he went...
...Fat Guy: I think he should speak...
...He will not—he will not—take the show to Chicago for the Democratic convention next week, notwithstanding that it will be filled with pompous donkeys like himself...
...THIS YEAR THE PEOPLE WEARING THE SILLIEST HATS ARE THE NETWORK CORRESPONDENTS WITH THEIR FORBIDDEN PLANET HEADSETS...
...But watching it on TV was weird...
...It was grand TV,” said ABC’s Jim Wooten after Colin Powell’s speech, “wellscripted, well-staged, craftily designed for a broadcast image of tolerance and diversity that’s starkly at odds with reality...
...In an amazing coincidence, three out of three network news anchors are white male millionaires...
...This is the essence of the film,” he assured us...
...It’s a very symbolic thing...
...Bill Schneider was again on the case...
...It’s an infomercial, if you will,” Tom Brokaw announced...
...What is it they want us to get from this video...
...Peter Jennings asked Jeff Greenfield on the convention floor...
...The spectacle so repulsed Koppel that he packed up his Nightline crew Tuesday night and left town in a cloud of dudgeon, with not a hair out of place...
...Bill Schneider, you’ve got a comment on the hat...
...The greatest distractions were provided by the networks themselves...
...it has the delicious added benefit of giving them tons of airtime...
...But you would be wrong...
...While the overarching message may have been that the convention was not worth watching, the network stars almost exhausted themselves explaining why...
...McQueen: Thank you...
...This is attempting to show that Bob Dole is a man of the people...
...And looking silly is what the network newshounds want to avoid at all costs...
...At least somebody was doing something smart last week...
...Even as the Republicans imposed the idiotizing standards of TV entertainment on their convention, with its mini-speeches and interactive video and celebrity walk-ons, the networks compounded the debacle by imposing on top of it the idiotizing standards of TV news...
...Then why can’t they do something about those Forbidden Planet headsets...
...Watching poor Candy Crowley or Lesley Stahl or Gene Randall wobbling around the convention floor, I was amazed they could even stand up...
...Of the hour’s worth of prime time ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted nightly to convention coverage, no more than 25 minutes were concerned with actual speeches...
...On the floor I was overwhelmed by pointless noise and surrounded by people wearing elephant costumes and Bob Dole sunglasses and colored shirts with placards stapled to their chests, while politicians hollered from behind a podium shaped like the grillwork of a 1956 Plymouth...
...For his part, Brokaw lost no opportunity to report the poll results showing that one out of five delegates was a white male millionaire...
...In case anyone missed the point, he declaimed his decision on the air, and the ABC office handed out copies of his statement to all comers...
...He did...
...It’s not the reality on the floor that matters,” Brooks Jackson said on CNN, “but what’s seen on TV...
...And when a Buchanan delegate showed up on the floor in a pro-life cowboy hat, she was besieged by Forbidden Planet-headed network correspondents (it looked like a gang rape by a group of air-traffic controllers...
...And the offense he took has had lasting repercussions...
...He must have assumed that CNN viewers from coast to coast were staring at their sets, slack-jawed and goggleeyed, utterly flummoxed by this turn of events...
...Well...
...None of the Big Three networks found it fit to air in its entirety...
...Isn’t this supposed to be the age of microtechnology...
...And with viewership down by 22 percent from 1992, we now know viewers were turning it off...
...Fat Guy in a “God Bless America” Tshirt: Yes, it is...
...I spent a couple of evenings on the convention floor and a couple evenings watching the show on the networks...
...Battle of the Network Dolts by Andrew Ferguson San Diego SINCE THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION was supposed to be the most sophisticated television production in political history, you’d think the place to watch it would be on TV...
...CBS wasn’t broadcasting the film, either, but it did show Elizabeth Dole watching the film it wasn’t showing...
...The other network newsfolk remained at their posts, of course, so they could continue to emphasize that their networks were spending millions of dollars to broadcast something that really wasn’t worth watching...
...This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event,” said Ted Koppel...
...In the trade, such instances of comic relief are called “contextualization,” a technique by which the correspondents interpose themselves between viewer and event, between the consumer of news and the news itself...
...We’re seeing him emerge from the people...
...But this is not so much liberal bias as typical TV stupidity...
...But the moment it was over, they set to work telling us what was in it...
...But the hacks would not be fooled, and they devoted the bulk of their airtime to proving they were not being fooled...
Vol. 1 • August 1996 • No. 48
