CHARADE '04
The Triumph of the Image
It has always had political power, but this time around, the image may finally trump substance — unless we find a way to make politics real
Once, on a clear August night in
East Berlin in 1961, when the cold war was at its most intense,
I watched Soviet tanks rumble down Unter den Linden and turn into
the bombed-out shell where the opera used to be. The tanks looked
black. In the open hatch of each was a man in a dark, featureless
hood. There were no commands. There were no voices in the street,
no sounds other than the grinding of tank treads. Nothing gleamed
in the moonlight, only the knowledge that behind this single file
the Soviets had more tanks, NATO said, than America had troops
in Germany. This was the real power behind the nominal East German
control of this part of the city. This was the glove taken off.
It was an image that radiated menace. For a moment, my New York
Herald Tribune had a small scoop on what became the confrontation
at Checkpoint Charlie, the first time armed Soviet and American
tanks had faced each other since they met at the Elbe in friendship
in 1945.
Recently, a television report about unsuccessful presidential
candidates — in this case, Michael Dukakis, with his head
and little round helmet sticking out of a tank — brought
to mind that moment in East Berlin. Why was Dukakis comical and
not powerful? We have more tanks than anyone in the world and
more power than the founders ever dreamed, and he might have been
the chief executive. But he looked funny and he lost. He got the
image wrong.
The four decades of change since that first image have been fascinating.
Then, there was a war against communism, in which the enemy had
a defined geography, an articulated philosophy, vocabularies of
reason and of power, and enormous resources. It had a face and
a home and nuclear weapons. The confrontation fostered unity at
home, us against them, at least for a while.
Now, in 2003, we have an amorphous war with a shadowy enemy who
is everywhere and nowhere and we may not know for decades if we
have won anything. We are together against terrorism, but that
is not, in the advertising phrase of the sixties, "togetherness."
You can see it in the ups and downs of the polls we take all the
time. It's like a fever chart. We approve of the president, we
don't approve of the president; we think the economy is on the
right track, we don't think the economy is on the right track.
Pick a topic — gun control, abortion, Medicare, Social Security,
Iraq, Israel — and there are zealots on every side who want
to define the world in terms of that one issue and will not listen.
This is now our way.
And it goes with the changes in the way we see and hear each other. Consensus is less and voices are more. When the tanks rolled in Berlin the United States had more daily newspapers but fewer networks; no 24-hour radio or cable news; few broadcast commentators (and none promoting an insistent political agenda to a national audience). The Internet did not exist. Mail came and went on pieces of paper. Starting a magazine cost a fortune. There was no desktop publishing, just as there were no desktop computers. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the country watched the three television networks because they were there and that's all the television pictures there were. Then we were a manufacturing nation. Now we are a communicating nation. Or so it is said.
We are in the middle of the greatest explosion of self-expression that the country has known since the literate white male population debated the adoption of the Constitution. Everyone can find a place to speak.
But that comes with a problem. If everybody talks, who listens?
The committed listen to each other. The believers find the niche
reporting that bolsters belief. The single-issue people have single-issue
Web sites and magazines.
There were always single-issue groups. But just think of how quickly
the women's suffrage movement might have been able to accomplish
its goals if it could have reached into more than two-thirds of
the homes in America with an e-mail message, a Web site, blogs,
a computer-published magazine, a few talk-show hosts, dedicated
radio jocks, and TV coverage of their first march down Broadway.
They would have scared the male establishment into fainting fits.
Howard Dean moved to the front of the line of Democratic presidential
hopefuls, not with TV but by using the Internet as no one has
before. Dean bypassed the party, tying together people with a
similar interest who would not have gotten his message forty years
ago. Creating a constituency is incomparably easier now, and once
he forged one, the press followed. Each "special interest"
(my cause is the truth, yours is a special interest) has its own
power of communication.
Yet each new mailing or magazine takes some of the nation's attention.
There are still only twenty-four hours in a day, and just as the
cable channels eat away at the hegemony of the broadcast networks,
so the niche efforts chip away at mass-circulation media. The
declining fortunes of mass media news organizations, in turn,
help foster the breakup in consensus.
To pull in a mass audience, mass media tend to take the easy route,
using the celebrities of the moment as a kind of totem to say,
"This is what we are all interested in." Consider first
the spectacular history of news magazines on television. 60 Minutes
once specialized in the serious and a lot of beating up on poor
fools who did something stupid. Other newsmagazines followed suit.
To this day, Wallace, Safer, Stahl, et al. decry the celebrity
interview. But what has happened to 60 Minutes is that the other
magazines, to compete, and to compete in tougher time periods,
brought on the singers, the murderers, the movie stars of the
moment, and got ratings out of them. Everybody wants to see a
movie star. So 60 Minutes has to compete from time to time. There
were always star interviews. Think back to the sainted Edward
R. Murrow and Person to Person. But ten magazine hours a week?
We would run out of celebrities if we didn't invent them so quickly.
Our time is a little like the Era of Wonderful Nonsense that
followed World War I. It wasn't that the nation never had stars
before that period; it was that we had never celebrated so many
of them so often, so ubiquitously. To this mix, in our time, add
the weight of new media, expanded media, cheap media. If you buy
the TV set, all it costs is electricity to see the broadcast channels,
and 70 percent of the country can afford cable, where a couple
of hundred channels jostle for space. Another 10 percent get satellite
TV. Each "personal" story gets repeated, recycled, regurgitated
a thousand times before it wears out. We have infinitely more
microphones and loudspeakers than they had in the twenties. We
create the celebrities more quickly, and finish them off more
certainly, than they ever could then. There is always a dizzying
ride waiting for a Gary Condit, a Laci Peterson, an Elián
González, a Kobe Bryant, because we need them to gather
an audience.
It is not a tragedy to be interested in ourselves, in celebrity,
in the moment. It is merely true and part of the sine curve of
our lives. The Era of Wonderful Nonsense eroded with the Depression.
Nothing has reached that depth in our time, at least not yet.
It almost did, two years ago in New York and Washington, D.C.
But all the talk of a more serious nation seems to have gone away.
After the fighting in Iraq was declared over, we started to look
a lot like we did before it began. We are the children of a cornucopia
of plenty — shared poorly, perhaps, but abundant — and
we relish our toys and our sensations.
Now we begin a presidential election year with a volume of communication never seen before. It is so large in quantity that it has changed the quality of discourse. There are lots of things reported on, but they are lost in the din of the flavor of the moment repeated endlessly. Any mild statement that is repeated just once — in every newspaper in America, in every Sunday supplement, on every Web site, in every chat room, in every printed magazine, on three all-news cable channels, on innumerable radio stations, on morning TV, local TV, evening TV, TV magazines, TV late-night comedy shows, radio call-in shows, all-news radio and the guy you spoke to at the water cooler — ceases to be a mild statement and becomes a roar.
We all live in this world. It is our culture. We think in its
terms. But politicians will have to reach across all the individual
outlets that constitute this avalanche of stuff to pull together
a constituency and influence national discourse. How will they
do it? They will reach for image.
Lesley Stahl tells the wonderful story of a night when she was
sure she nailed a candidate with a hard-hitting report while he
was on the campaign trail. To her surprise, she got a call from
his campaign manager thanking her for the story. She saw smart
reporting. He saw a candidate who looked great on TV. He was right.
To signal his role in the war, President Bush used an aircraft carrier and the image of Top Gun. What the banner behind him said may not have been dead on — mission has not been accomplished — but what he looked like was dead on. Senator John Kerry "officially" announced his candidacy in front of an aircraft carrier. He gave a snappy salute to fellow veterans. His record of military service with honor is unusual among the candidates, but all of them will use the imagery of red, white, and blue. The images speak to beliefs carried through generations, beliefs that really are The American Dream. They can mean different things to different people while still being positive signs. They take effort to arrange but need no effort by us to register. The unspoken language of politics is more powerful than any position paper. Arnold Schwarzenegger became an instant contender for governor of California not because he had policy ideas but because he was an idea — strength, command, heroism, celebrity.
Images have always been important in politics. Abraham Lincoln's
campaign capitalized on the image of the log cabin and the backwoods
railsplitter. George Washington cultivated the forms of a fellow
citizen and would not take a third term because he thought it
sent the wrong image.
What was different for them, in part, was a longer news cycle.
The address to Congress could register and reverberate. Speaker and audience expected serious attention. If there had been sound bites, they would have been very long. At Gettysburg, the address we think of was Lincoln's. He spoke poetry and ideas for two minutes. The address that made most of the reports was Edward Everett's, the Massachusetts politician and orator who preceded the president. He spoke prose for two hours and it was the entertainment of the day.
Now, speed is greater, context less. A serious person on the platform today must make an impression through a many-faceted press world with no time to spare. How to do it? Reach for a simple, graspable message.
Forty years ago Daniel Boorstin persuasively wrote about manipulated
images and celebrities — people who are famous for being
famous. Our improvement has been to find derivatives. The Russian
tanks on Unter den Linden could have blown peace apart. Michael
Dukakis's tank was a derivative of that menace. This is easier
to understand than the Wall Street derivatives, but it works on
the same principle: somewhere there is a reality. We use a bit
of it to try to make our points.
If you doubt the potential power of this, think of the attack
on 9/11. Putting the attack and the name of Saddam Hussein in
the same sentence over and over again wound up convincing three-quarters
of this country that they were causally connected.
All of this — the multiplicity of voices, the increasing volume of news, the limited attention span, the splintering of a mass audience and the attempts to rebuild it via the celebrification of the news — come to bear now in an election season.
Campaigns no longer take place on the stump, although it might
look that way in front of well-gathered, well-prepped crowds.
The coming well-spun contest will take place in the newspapers,
the television screens, the radio reports, the Internet sites
and chat rooms, the magazine spreads, the instant books, and insistent
phone banks that are the life of a communications society. Lincoln
and Douglas are not going to debate. They did that to attract
and then persuade the crowds that were the voters. Those crowds
now stay home. They watch a televised Q&A session between
candidates and some reporters that we call a debate. Once, it
was thought that the press was a mirror to reality, to our times.
But there are so many outlets now, each with a small bit of the
picture, that if they form a mirror it is one of those disco-ball
faceted surfaces that reflect the lights well but don't give much
of a picture. Politicians actually reach the voters via a million
small, second-hand encounters. The audience in the room was tiny,
but the real audience watching Bill Clinton in his famous MTV
appearance was huge, because it was reported so often in other
outlets. He told a lot of people about boxers and briefs. And
the message of being in touch with youth, unspoken, was just one
of the many little disparate touches that made the whole campaign.
So, how shall the 2004 campaign be reported? There are issues
enough at stake. Each one has passionate advocates. But the general
press, the mass media, tend to treat the real issues at arm's
length, something like the way civics textbooks treat the three
branches of government: descriptively, as though they occurred
on Mars. It may be that the press has removed itself from the
passion of our times. I don't think so. I think the truth is that
we are just like everyone else and what interests us is essentially
the gossip of the campaign trail. Or it may be that as reporters
we are so fascinated by the machinery of politics that we forget
the impact of politics.
The odd thing is that we continue to pay alms to the idea of the issues, but the juice in the reporting is about the horse-race. We are so afraid of being biased, so wary of the single-issue people, that we withdraw. There are genuine excitements around us. Politics has a real effect on how we live. But we go at it with exactly balanced word counts that nobody pays any attention to, least of all us.
The do-good contingent says we must eschew the horse race and
cover the issues. But the press faces an election, too, and it
is far more constant than what the politicians face. We have to
win a public vote of acceptance almost every day in order to stay
viable commercially. And that means pleasing the public. We are
caught in a dilemma that was a long time in the making: to win
attention, we have sought celebrity and sensation; we won attention
but competition raised the celebrity stakes and now we need all
its trappings.
But we also need a way to be valuable and important to this democratic
system. There is a peculiar arms-race feel to our problem. The
politicians want to use our megaphone to slip past us and talk,
unmediated, to that audience we have gathered. We want to use
our megaphone to bring the entire political process to account.
They move into image and sloganeering, and they define how the
issues shall be framed and in what order; we thrash around for
new ways to cover what they do and regain control of the flow
of information.
If we want to come to grips with the way this election will be fought, we need to find a way to counter the image game. It is no longer good enough for a reporter to put in the stuff that tells the truth only to have a campaign manager say thank you for preserving the image. And it is uncomfortable to have Newsweek dismiss "the brutish simple-mindedness of the campaign press corps."
Can we use image or metaphor ourselves? Is there an Internet language that will deconstruct the spin to show what is really going on? (If anything is going on; there's always the chance that the candidate has no convictions or ideas.)
What we need now is a discussion about how to meet the world
of images and bring it back to reality. When we put on the do-good
hat and report on things we consciously think of as "serious,"
we are stuffy and unreadable; the rest of the time we create,
exploit, and then abandon celebrities. We have bought derivatives.
Perhaps as a result, we and the politicians are being marginalized.
Circulation is down; the vote is down. There is a hint that the
public can do without us. Letterman and Leno are prime dispensers
of what's happening in an election. Everyone seeks meaning but
it doesn't seem to reside anywhere.
There is no point in exhorting the public to care. This is the
only public we have and it will do what it wants. Our task is
to point out — with the same persuasive power that images
bring — that unreality is a bad thing and cheap manipulation
will hurt everyone.
When The New York Times went through its travails with an errant reporter, newsrooms around the country sat down to worry if they should do something to protect themselves. This is more important. How do we bring home that what is decided a year from now will affect us all for decades to come?
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