Putting Congress on the Tube

By LANCE MORROW

After Canada's House of Commons installed television cameras and started recording its proceedings for the tube last fall, the tailors and barbers of Ottawa found themselves with an unexpected rush of parliamentary business. Members bought pastel-colored suits to brighten their images on the air. They had their hair styled. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau reverted to the Caesar cut that he wore in his triumphant 1968 campaign.

Now that the U.S. House of Representatives has decided to admit TV cameras to witness its daily business, House leaders fear that something more fundamental than personal fashions may be disrupted by the intrusion. They believe that the onlooking electronic eye, with its unpredictable and even mysterious refractions of reality, might be an alien influence, a distraction that could profoundly change the nature of the House--its procedures, its schedules, its public image, even the quality of the legislation it produces.

The House is less of a gentlemen's club than the Senate. It is more like, say, a parliamentary version of Stillman's Gym. But over two centuries it has evolved its own internal rhythms and intricate habits of doing business. Most of its work, for example, is accomplished in committee, not on the House floor. A visitor to the gallery is usually startled to find two-thirds of the seats empty; a transcendent tedium often reigns. As half a dozen members attend to the debate at hand, others read, amble, joke or even doze. It is not beyond the frontiers of possibility that a member might show up drunk, or threaten to punch another member. Into such an atmosphere, TV cameras would arrive like censorious missionaries landing on a pagan island.

The prospect makes the House very nervous. The question now is: Who shall control the cameras? Speaker Tip O'Neill, along with the seven-member subcommittee that studied the matter for the House, is adamant that the House should keep the cameras under its own supervision. Television, O'Neill and many other members sense, is too potent a presence to be allowed to graze freely amid such lush Americana. "I've talked to the Speaker of the Australian Parliament [which also televises] and the Speaker of the Canadian Parliament," says O'Neill. "They both told me: 'Don't let it out of your own control.' "

O'Neill and the House Rules Committee basically want to follow the Canadian example, with fixed cameras focusing on the three spots from which members officially speak during business: the Speaker's rostrum and the majority and minority tables. There would also be several movable cameras to provide different angles, but some fear that the whole system, if run by Government employees, would blinker off the surrounding atmospherics. The cameras would, in fact, provide a kind of visual Congressional Record--except of course that members would not be permitted to edit their remarks, as they often do now before the Record is printed. The TV tapes, or a live cable feed, would be made available to the commercial and public broadcast networks to edit and broadcast as they wished.

The Speaker understandably feels wary about what the cameras might do to the routines of the House. But it seems reclusive and contradictory to keep the public from obtaining a full view of the most democratic of federal processes. No doubt the presence of cameras recording the events can change the nature of the events themselves--a familiar law of the electronic age. Still, the change may not be as traumatic as some fear. It might even bring improvements. Congressional rhetoric might become crisper, for example. Members, conscious of their new audience, might in some subtle way feel a sharpened sense of their responsibilities. Television would surely intensify public interest in Congress and the issues it is debating. But O'Neill and others in the House are superstitious about television: they crave its sweet attention while dreading its power.

The introduction of TV presents a variety of problems that will to some extent disrupt the House. Will the presence of TV cameras encourage members to avoid committees, where they should work, in favor of attention-getting oratory on the floor?

Or will members quickly become accustomed to the presence of cameras and simply go about their business as before? On a less substantive level, will members find it necessary to wear sun glasses against the bright lights -- and thus make Congress look something like a Mafia meeting?

Forty-four state legislatures, the U.N. and several national parliaments have installed forms of TV coverage.

In Canada, there were initial worries that the scanning cameras might catch members of Parliament yawning, scratching and looking unstatesmanlike; such shots were forbidden. The prohibition has not saved members from public amazement at the caterwauling razz and table-thumping in which they engage. Says Media Mystagogue Marshall McLuhan: "It's preliterate behavior. People think they belong in a nuthouse."

A reasonable case can be made, as the TV networks and some members of the House argue, that within certain limits control of the coverage should be in the hands of TV journalists. The visual-record plan suggested by O'Neill raises some problems of credibility. Should those who are making the news be directing the cameras on the news? Says George Watson, vice president for ABC News in Washington: "It would be a dangerous precedent. What if the President decides he's tired of the unruly lot of cameramen that follows him everywhere he goes? Why shouldn't he just get the USIA to provide coverage for everybody?"

Most Congressmen wonder if the commercial networks could be trusted to be responsible in their coverage. TV cameras, after all, point instinctively toward the conflict, the noise, the humor. Might not, then, network TV provide an entirely skewed version of the day-to-day routines of the House, thereby turning what ought to be a meticulous daily record into a bedraggled Rashomon of contradiction?

Similar anxieties surfaced about the prospect of televising the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Both commercial television and the committee members came away from that encounter looking rather nobler than usual. Commercial TV's record in public affairs, at least as a tactful witness if not as a commentator, has often been good and sometimes distinguished. The networks have risen to large occasions -- the McCarthy hearings, assassinations, moon shots. Perhaps a prefigurement can be seen in the radio broadcasts of the Senate's Panama Canal debates. The broadcast of the debates has raised the tone and self-awareness of the speakers. If the networks established a pool system and followed certain rules of discretion laid down by the House management, the system would surely produce something better than the somewhat stolid and formal self-portrait that O'Neill suggests.

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