The New York Times buried a lede big-time in its story about the Clinton-Obama Pennsylvania debate.
That debate was widely criticized for the way the hosting network and its moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, devoted the first half of the 90-minute debate to questions of little substance, such as the importance of wearing American flag lapel pins.
Wrote The Times: "The media post-mortem — which boiled over in more than 17,600 comments posted on the ABC Web site alone — also touched on questions that had long been simmering in the protracted Democratic campaign over the role of moderators in televised debates, to say nothing of political journalists generally.
"If there was a common theme, it was that Mr. Gibson and Mr. Stephanopoulos had front-loaded the debate with questions that many viewers said they considered irrelevant when measured against the faltering economy or the Iraq war, like why Senator Barack Obama did not wear an American flag pin on his lapel. Others rapped the journalists for dwelling on matters that had been picked over for weeks, like the incendiary comments of Mr. Obama’s former pastor, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that she had to duck sniper fire in Bosnia more than a decade ago."
The Times did not resolve the question until the story's last two paragraphs. Usually, newspaper people like to get the question answered in the first paragraph, or lede, then use the rest of the story to explain the answer.
The last two paragraphs in the story: "Don Hewitt, the director and producer of the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, said ABC’s structuring of the questions was an acknowledgment that a debate entails 'a big dose of show biz' and 'trying to keep an audience.'
'When you’re in television,' Mr. Hewitt said, 'that’s your job.' "
Those truths were revealed, literally, in that Kennedy-Nixon televised debate, the very first presidential television debate, in September, 1960. John F. Kennedy – talk about an elite – was savvy, or made savvy, about the power of the new medium, television, to establish an image, so he dressed the part. He rested before the event, and worked on his tan. These were preparations, he realized, as vital as answers to any issue of the day.
Nixon, meanwhile, the old-school pol – talk about stubborn – was traveling hard, making speech after speech, and he arrived in Chicago, site of the debate, looking tired, and he was tired. He looked pale and drawn. Sallow. And he had a noticeable, natural, five o-clock shadow. At the studio, his managers and the television people sought to make him look better with face make-up. Plus, he was a natural perspirer.
In the heat of the debate, and lights – mostly the lights – Nixon started to sweat, and his make-up started to run. In David Halberstam's book, "The 50's," Hewitt said JFK's manager started calling for more shots of Nixon than of his man, and Nixon's manager was insisting on more shots of JFK. Cool and collected as the opposition might appear, anything was better than close-ups of Nixon in meltdown.
It was a famous evening in politics, and in televised politics. If Hewitt and his contemporaries had not realized it already, that debate showed that they were not in the business of televising politics. They were in the business of televising, period. That means a big dose of showbiz, and trying to keep an audience. In other words, in television, the audience comes before the issues.
Years later, Russell Baker of The New York Times wrote of the Kennedy-Nixon debate: "That night, image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics." Where, then, does a public desperate for change go, for an in-depth comparison of Clinton and Obama? Kurt Loder is an interesting person to provide that answer. Loder won his media fame as an anchor for MTV, the television product that more than any other contributed to the evolution of the short American attention span. Loder later became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, getting back into print in obedience to his own advice. In a teaching video produced by The Annenberg Foundation, Loder says you can't rely on television for all of your information. Television just can't provide the depth, he says, and will always be "an adjunct to the printed word."
Gibson, Stephanopoulos, and the Adjunct Broadcasting Company illustrated these truths again the other night.
No comments:
Post a Comment