Proving Lincoln Was Right

By Thomas Griffith

This is the year in which those who market our presidential candidates mastered the art of bypassing the press. As a result, it took until the first debate before issues finally got joined. The merchandising of the candidates will increase while the press, so far with limited success, seeks to pierce it.

Candidates naturally aim to use the press without being burned by it, but never before have the marketers of candidates so successfully evaded real press scrutiny while staging controlled events that show their candidates to best advantage on television. The Reagan people have had four years of practice at it. Columnist James Reston of the New York Times, who has seen Presidents come and go (he is a few steps short of 75), ruefully describes them as "the best public relations team ever to enter the White House." They got away with cutting presidential press conferences to the fewest in ten years, knowing these can expose Reagan's ignorances. They get their man on nightly television with a planned quip and a farewell wave, while the helicopter's rotors drown out questions. White House advisers anonymously brief network correspondents, promoting Reagan's policies and taking potshots at his critics.

Network correspondents then troop triumphantly out on the White House lawn to mouth these comments as if they were repeating inside information instead of the daily Administration line. Washington's print journalists are a frustrated lot. Pooh-bah journalism is dead, and the role of the Washington columnist diminished, both having given way to television's visual immediacy.

Print journalists continue to do their job, which sometimes involves correcting a President's facts, recording divisions in his Administration or noting his own inattention to affairs, but they wonder how many want to hear it. Two months ago Reston noted "the remarkable gap between public opinion and inside-Washington opinion." Pulitzer Prizewinner Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post began one report: "So far, he's proving Lincoln was right. You can fool all of the people some of the time." The Post's David Broder discouragingly described "a nation that does not want to be bothered by anything that does not translate into immediate personal benefit." Broder in conversation ascribes this to a prospering economy and to "contentment with Reagan as they have seen him. But they don't see him in meetings, they don't see him in unprepared situations." That is why, Broder believes, Reagan's debate performance disturbed so many.

The marketers of candidates tend to tolerate print journalists but used to kowtow to television news stars. This year the TV stars too are being bypassed. All the morning news programs, 60 Minutes and the Sunday talk shows have besieged the candidates to expound their views to large audiences for free, but acceptances have been few. Ralph Nader accuses the candidates of being "foolishly cautious" and is specially critical of Mondale, who needs all the visibility he can get. But the handlers of all the candidates fear gaffes and awkward questions. They prefer their candidates to be seen on evening news shows making public appearances they can more closely control, and to spend millions of dollars on TV commercials, where without challenge they can hammer home simplistic themes. Often in these the viewer doesn't even see the candidate, but instead watches synthetic man-in-the-street interviews, where carefully recruited people speak with rehearsed spontaneity. At this point, the truth has moved so far into left field that it would take two cutoff men to relay it back to home plate. What campaign marketers have learned is that viewers do not often distinguish between "paid TV" and "free TV"; after a while it all becomes something they "have seen on television."

Journalists may at times be abrasive, arrogant or less than brilliant, and everyone is entitled to his own dislikes among them. But the cavalier way in which the Reagan and Mondale camps dismissed 83 top journalists as debate questioners is hard to match for arrogance. The campaign being waged by the marketers is a shoddy parody of the democratic process.