Pirandello Would Have Been Lost

By Thomas Griffith

After so unsatisfactory a campaign, someone has to be at fault. Why not the press? After all, as James David Barber, a political scientist at Duke University, argues: "Journalists are the new kingmakers." Far from being puffed up at the honor, journalists are apt to reply: "Who, me? Thanks but no thanks." They, too, are wondering, like card players with a poor hand, "Who dealt this mess?"

They should not look all that innocent. The media are pervasive. Americans know what they know about candidates from the press. And journalists are conspicuous--whether it is the pontificating anchorman or the pesky reporter. The modest reply, more true than not true, is that the press has about as much control over the campaign as Howard Cosell does over a football game.

Last month Tom Winship, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, chastised his colleagues because the campaign "ain't no box office hit, and the press deserves some of the blame. By and large, we are letting the candidates set the agenda." Winship repeated the familiar self-reproach that newspapers weren't raising significant issues. To which Paula Hawkins, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Florida, answers: "You never win an election on issues. The only people who want to be specific are editors and journalists. The people out there are tired of someone who has all the answers." Only half kiddingly, Barber would even "forbid a candidate to discuss what he would do if elected," remembering F.D.R.'s promise in 1932 to balance the budget and Nixon as the exemplar of law-and-order. So what is left? Creating a favorable impression of what you would be like in office. That was campaigning, 1980-style: not issues, but attitudes; not character, but appearance. The result has been the development of parody news, which has earned the same status as real news.

Parody news comes in two kinds: what the candidate wants known or concealed about himself, and the image he tries to hang on his opponent. The methods are old but have never before been so professionally deployed. Nowadays a group the size of a basketball team dominates a campaign: the candidate, his fund raiser, his "issues" man, his pollster and his adman. The pollster leaves it to the Gallups or Harrises to record who is ahead; he minutely tests his candidate's trouble spots, his opponent's weaknesses, so that daily adjustments can be made. If Reagan seems weak with women, have him promise a woman judge; if Carter gains no ground by denouncing Reagan's tax cut, have Carter promise one himself. Thus did parody news operate day by day and become news of its own. Having long wearied of reporting a candidate's "set speech," many journalists wrote insider stories of how strategists were positioning their candidates. If the image maker gauged his "perceptions" correctly, the press found itself adapting those images, helpfully pointing out some new sample of Reagan's extremism, or Carter's meanspiritedness. Pirandello would have found himself lost in these corridors.

Candidates learned to schedule as few press conferences as possible, and to have some rehearsed ad lib ready for the cameras as they stepped from a plane. Thus bypassed, reporters badgered the candidates, "hoping," in Barber's words, "for some bit of quotable idiocy, usually making do with some hypothetical clash," and concentrated on gaffes.

But only part of what appeared in the media was mediated by the press itself. The rest came in through the advertising man's door, lavishly contributed by the taxpayer. Here parody news was made to look like the real thing, whether in carefully chosen snippets of a candidate looking good in a public appearance or in "negative commercials" about an opponent--an unfortunate specialty of Carter's adman Gerald Rafshoon, though hardly exclusive to him. It is a corruption of the political process to photograph a hundred voters, in an imitation of random man-in-the-street sampling, and use only the ones who say they fear that Reagan would blow up the world. Even if the viewer knows it is a commercial, the image men expect the subliminal "actuality" to linger. So widespread is this practice that NBC Nightly News, in the election's final week, put together a cutesie "news" item, with a quick succession of voters, each saying, "I'm undecided"; "I'm undecided." Even the devices of parody news had become a part of real news.

If one responsibility of the press, in Barber's view, is to plumb a candidate's background and his knowledge of the facts, the press did that job well with Reagan. He was not so much unknown as too simply perceived. The press had to get past Reagan's aw-shucks actor's persona and also avoid another parody--the straw-filled scarecrow wild man the Carter people created. Reporting gave the voters a plausible portrait of a 9-to-5 executive, only passably informed, given to exaggerated remarks but cautious in action, who wants complicated problems reduced to Reader's Digest brevity, then decides about them without heartburn.

In older days, when candidates were more at the mercy of the press, there were frequent angry cries of bias. Hearing few such complaints from politicians this time, the Boston Globe's Winship frets that "we are probably not doing our job." That's more hair-shirting than is necessary; the rarity of partisan bias was refreshing. Several usually vociferous press commentators seemed stunned by unenthusiasm. "It's impossible to determine which of these men would be the more capable President," concluded the Washington Post's David S. Broder. On the Sunday before the election, Columnist Joseph Kraft lamented: "My own mind is not made up. I would certainly not recommend either candidate to anybody." But such negative impartiality had another aspect.

In a philosophical moment, White House Press Secretary Jody Powell told the New York Times: "If people keep getting told that their leadership is poor, or ineffective, and that they don't have any real choices, you'll see a fairly steady erosion in the legitimacy of Government. That's going to have a real impact on anybody's ability to govern--Reagan's or ours."

The widespread cynicism about 1980 politics may have been inherent in the situation and in the choice of candidates, and it may have been a faithful reflection of the public's mood, but the press certainly amplified it.

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