‘Broadcast News’ Closes in on Evening News

Did Gary Hart and James L. Brooks get together and plan this?

“Broadcast News” could not have been better timed, its Wednesday release closely following Hart’s shocking re-entry as a presidential candidate seven months after withdrawing in face of a potential sex scandal.

Much of this week’s coverage of Hart’s attempted revival is a fitting companion to Brooks’ observant and hilarious theatrical movie that parodies network news as profoundly hollow and trivial.

Brooks ridicules his subject for often stressing messenger over message, looks over smarts, and style over content. Some of that could apply to the shallowness of the Hart coverage, with nearly all of TV boring in on Hart’s chances of winning--the old horse race--while ignoring the “new ideas” whose significance he said compelled him to resume campaigning.

As Bruce Herschensohn asked on KABC-TV Channel 7: “ What new ideas?”

Yes, what are Hart’s “new ideas?” Are they newer than the ideas of the other Democratic candidates or does Hart have nothing new to offer beyond the spectacle of the risen dead? For the most part, you wouldn’t know from watching TV. More about that shortly.

William Hurt, Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks form the romantic triangle in “Broadcast News” as Tom Grunick, Jane Craig and Aaron Altman, the likable characters who work in the Washington bureau of a major network.

Grunick is inept, an endearing slug of a reporter soaring to the top on looks and form. Craig is a neurotic, driven, brilliant, idealistic producer being slowly seduced by the very corrupting process she abhors. Altman is the movie’s consistent moral conscience, rejecting sham and superficiality, a seasoned and first-rate reporter being surpassed by the ambitious, more-charismatic Grunick.

Handsome and anchorly, Grunick has the formula for TV success. You know he is on his way when he acquires the network correspondent’s ultimate symbol of credibility: suspenders.

The movie’s most telling sequence has the inexperienced Grunick being picked over Altman to anchor a live special on an important breaking story, with Craig electronically putting words into his mouth by feeding him facts and interview questions through an earpiece. Grunick looks and sounds wonderful. It’s frightening.

“What’s the next step?” Altman wonders: “Lip syncing?” What’s next in this business, too often, is whatever works.

Writer-director-producer Brooks, whose first film was Academy Award-winning “Terms of Endearment,” has a glowing TV pedigree. He is executive producer of “The Tracey Ullman Show” on Fox, and his previous credits include “Taxi,” “Lou Grant” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He once even worked for CBS News.

His “Broadcast News” lights up all burners as romantic fun and laughs (undoubtedly his first priority), but it is not necessarily a definitive piece on TV news.

Brooks was prophetic in having the network in “Broadcast News” rocked by economic upheaval and mass firings a la recent actual events. Yet Paddy Chayefsky’s broader “Network” was more visionary and closer to the heart of TV as society’s ultimate turnstile and manipulator of events and emotions.

“Broadcast News” broadsides some fat targets. One is TV’s celebration of the reporter. “Yes,” remarks Altman, sarcastically, “let’s never forget we’re the real story. . . .” And what about the play-acting of ersatz journalists? “I don’t like the feeling that I’m pretending to be a reporter,” Grunick says. Unfortunately, many love the feeling.

But these are easy, familiar marks, TV news getting flattened after leading with its customary glass jaw.

As for the characters, Jane Craig is the truest of the three, a piercingly accurate metaphor for the many extremely bright, intense and principled people who enter TV news with high aspirations and become homogenized, often without realizing it.

“Broadcast News” seems to suggest that TV news is a constant tug of war between hordes of Grunicks and a few stubbornly uncompromising Altmans, with a vacuum in the center. Yet Grunick and Altman are almost too obvious and predictable as the opposite poles in this story.

Nor is Grunick the prototype for network anchors. There’s room to debate the relative merits of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings as journalists, but they are . . . journalists , each having paid his dues in some fashion, unlike Grunick, who is merely a news reader and marionette.

Speaking of the obvious and predictable, meanwhile, there is that Hart coverage. Where was the beef?

Were Hart’s “new ideas” merely leftovers from his 1984 campaign? If so, a refresher course would have helped.

On CNN Wednesday night, reporter Tom Mintier did compare several of Hart’s “new ideas” with proposals of the other candidates, concluding that “the other Democrats sound a lot like Hart, or he sounds a lot like the others.” But that was all too brief.

So were the 45 seconds that Jim Lehrer gave those “new ideas” during his combative 5 1/2-minute Hart interview on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” Wednesday. And so was Ted Koppel’s attention to those “new ideas” during his hour interview with Hart on “Nightline” Tuesday night.

At least they addressed Hart’s “new ideas.”

Just about everyone else ignored them through Thursday morning. Instead, newscasts and interview programs continued obsessively dwelling on the process of the campaign rather than the content. “It’s hard to see why any of the other candidates would feel threatened,” James Wooten reported about Hart from New Hampshire on ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “It’s a campaign that can generate excitement,” Bob Schieffer reported about Hart from New Hampshire on “The CBS Evening News.”

There were Hart and his wife, Lee, on the snowy campaign trail. Great pictures.

There were the voters on the street, either loving or hating Hart. Great conflict.

There were the instant polls on his prospects. Great graphics.

There were the Hart watchers speculating about his motives and his chances and his Donna Rice baggage and his character. Great energy.

Voters will deliver their own verdicts on all of that, as Hart repeatedly pointed out, and the media can help by examining those “new ideas” and thereby revealing him either as a true messiah or the sum of catchy slogans.

“If you look at his ideas, they’re big ideas, they’re not just new ideas,” former Hart strategist Patrick H. Caddell assured Harry Smith and Kathleen Sullivan on “CBS This Morning.” They didn’t ask Caddell how big and how new, or even what they were. “What do you think is really driving him?” Smith asked instead.

It was Sullivan more than anyone else, in fact, who epitomized TV’s horse-racing mentality in her Wednesday interview with Hart opponents Jesse Jackson and Illinois Sen. Paul Simon.

Simon predicted that the media will now “get involved in the trivia, the non-issues.” Jackson accused the media of refusing to cover “issues of substance.” Sullivan rebutted that by turning the interview to Jackson’s “personal life.” She met Jackson’s repeated attempts to forgo Hart and discuss social and economic issues with this challenge: “All right, let’s focus on New Hampshire. You have to deal with him there.”

“But . . . beneath that snow in New Hampshire is a lot of poverty,” Jackson protested. “But how are you going to get that message out now ?” asked Sullivan.

The horses were back galloping.

The interview most deserving of an instant replay was not Sullivan’s, however. It was Jane Pauley’s “Today” interview of “Broadcast News” star Holly Hunter. It was double-take time as Pauley, an employee of NBC News, asked Hunter, an actress portraying a news employee, “what it takes to be” a news producer.

Meanwhile, focusing on New Hampshire . . . .