Winging It on Television

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch/ Thomas Griffith

The press can get squeakily self-conscious when the subject is the press itself. On ABC's This Week with David Brinkley recently, the host noted that "the White recession has been accusing us and others like us of prolonging the recession and impeding the recovery by constantly reporting bad news of rising unemployment. Are we guilty of that?" Condensed somewhat -- to avoid windiness and repetition -- here is how his panelists answered:

George F. Will: The problem with television, not that it really has any, is that it's a severe to a camera, a peculiar newsgathering instrument. It has severe time constraints -- 22 minutes in a newscast -- and therefore is more apt to focus on vivid sights such as economic casualties and not economic complexities.

Hodding Carter: The indictment of television is absolutely valid . . .

David Brinkley: Well, wait a minute. What do you mean? That we are guilty of prolonging the recession?

Carter: No. That the way we approach news is almost automatically built around what has to be called the vivid, the impactful and, usually, the bad news.

Sam Donaldson: That's not an indictment.

Brinkley: I don't think it's even true.

Carter: Let me finish it. It is also one of the conceits of this business that we have more impact than we really do. The idea that television is out there influencing this massive economic machine, which is the U.S. economy, let alone the intermix of the world economy, is ridiculous.

Donaldson: My job is not to say here's the church social with the apple pie, isn't it beautiful? Here are things that are going right. Not my job to tell anyone what to do about [problems] . . .

Carter: Straw man. Straw man.

Donaldson: The President's job is to solve those problems.

Will: That's right, but one way of solving them is to communicate a hopeful message, and so he goes to St. Louis to a plant that's going to hire 3,000 new people in order to get this message across. The White House gets upset because, clearly, when you call attention to motives, you sort on drain the effectiveness from the theater they're putting on.

Brinkley (summing up): "Well, we might say to the White House, 'Fine, thanks very much, we've heard it before.' "

As an English critic says, television talk is meant to be seen and not heard. On the Brinkley show, which is the best of its kind, the panelists are well-informed, articulate sometimes to the point of glibness, assured sometimes to the point of effrontery. When put into print, their shooting from the lip often seems less than profound, but on television who worries?

A kind of two-tiered journalism now exists: television and then everything else. No one appreciates this more than Ronald Reagan. It suits him that television is as preoccupied with creating impressions as it is with passing on information. Before his State of the Union address, Reagan briefed the three networks' top anchormen at lunch. Such favoritism angered the excluded print journalists. Still, Reagan is not the first President to hold private sessions for editors, columnists and others considered influential. At the anchormen's lunch, Reagan was at such ease that he confided, "After all the years in the other industry, I've been surprised that I could still get puckered up," going in to address Congress.

Last week he urged the networks to devote a week to "good" news, "then, if the ratings go down, they can go back to the bad news." CBS News Anchorman Dan Rather called this "a discredited technique," to blame "the people who call attention to the problems." NBC commented: "We'll cover the news and let him run the country." Reagan rarely bothers about what is said in print. His preference for TV extends to hastily called mini-news conferences. Speaking extemporaneously, he frequently misstates facts, but only meticulous newspaper readers will ponder the later corrections.

Yet why shouldn't a President use whatever means work best for him? In doing so, the President may score a few unearned victories. But as the polls indicate, the public in time makes up its own mind from realities as well as talk. That seems to be what is bothering the President. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.