CJR Voices
That's Television!
The news is a stage, the stage is the news
Two swallows don’t make a summer, of course, but still, they may be more than mere coincidence. In the space of seven November days, two small stories flitted across the air that, while seemingly unrelated, shared similar markings. Each involved the manipulation by a cable news network of a political debate it was covering, and the deliberate effort to bring showbiz values into the news.
As the Senate was gearing up for its marathon debate over President Bush’s nominees for judgeships, so too was Fox News — as was made clear in a memo sent earlier that day by Majority Leader Bill Frist’s staff assistant to his colleagues in the offices of fellow Republican senators. Urging them to “get your boss to S230 on time,” the memo explained that “Brit Hume at 6 would love to open with all our 51 senators walking onto the floor — the producer wants to know will we walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so they get it live to open Brit Hume’s show?” (The idea for a “stay-up-all-night” session “like those of yesteryear” appears to have sprung from an editorial published last spring in The Weekly Standard, Fox’s sibling; it was pushed again by anchors Hume and Tony Snow in an October interview with Frist.)
Meanwhile, CNN, gearing up for its Rock the Vote debate among eight Democratic presidential candidates before an audience of eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds in Boston, was also bent on ensuring a good show. Concerned that the content might be a bit heavy on substance and a bit light on sizzle — and no doubt aware of that dramatic moment in a previous campaign season when a presidential candidate had been asked a question about his preference in underwear — a CNN producer managed to persuade a Brown University student, who had hoped to ask a serious question about technology, to pose instead, and against her better judgment, what the producer later described as a more “light-hearted” question to the candidates: Do you prefer Macs or PCs?
However understandable the impulse, the temptation to direct the news in the interest of making it more appealing is always a dangerous business, and particularly so when it comes to political news. Even trivial manipulations can compromise the integrity of the news event — and further validate the public’s distrust when the manipulations come to light. And come to light they do: in the case of Fox, the memo was leaked to the Washington weekly The Hill; in the case of CNN, the used student described publicly what had happened, in self-defense against the excoriations of the Brown community for having wasted an opportunity with that really dumb question.
As the nation heads into this crucial campaign year, perhaps these incidents can serve to inspire a simple resolution. Journalists might vow to remember that politics itself is plenty entertaining without any embellishment by them.
This creep of entertainment values into television news, in one form or another, has been lamented by critics for years — the music, the banter, the haircuts; the seductive pull of celebrity; the corrupting drive for synergy. And so on. Little did we dream, however, that the crossover could actually move in both directions, that countervailing winds might turn the tide one day.
This fall, with the surprising announcement by CBS that it had cancelled its four-hour miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, that day arrived. Once it had been pointed out to the network by apoplectic Republicans that the movie failed to measure up to the traditionally accepted journalistic values of say, Fox News — not only, Republicans raged, did the movie lack accuracy, fairness, and balance, but (shades of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair!) it contained “invented quotes” as well — CBS’s choice was clear. Never mind the archives crammed with countless other fictionalized treatments of public figures, from FDR and Ike to Nixon and the Kennedys. And never mind the artistic values of dramatic license and creative interpretation that usually flow freely in such docudramas, both the good ones and the not-so-good. In a subtle twist of logic, it was the values of journalism that won the day. So of course The Reagans had to go, if only to another, more limited venue.
From that paradoxical outcome, observers dismayed by the implications of this incident, and the incidents described above, may take some small degree of comfort: between TV news and entertainment, a perfectly symmetrical exchange of values may soon, at long last, be achieved.
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