Stations Vote Down Documentary on ‘TV Election’

Does the TV box control the ballot box?

That nagging question surfaced again in Monday’s PBS documentary “The Prime-Time President.” It rises anew in tonight’s televised debate between vice presidential candidates Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle, where the small screen is being counted on to project the big picture.

And it’s the heart of a 90-minute documentary titled “The Made-for-TV Election,” which, although pertinent, powerful and persuasive, may never appear on TV.

“This program is being suppressed,” charged producer William B. Shanley, who has sunk more than nine years into making and trying to sell his program, which is narrated by Martin Sheen and uses the 1980 campaign to critically examine the way TV covers all presidential elections.

All that he has to show for the $400,000 project so far are disappointment, frustration and $190,000 in personal debts.

“I’ve gone through car repossession and I sold my condominium and editing system just to hire people to help me rewrite,” said Shanley, whose major partners in this venture are his old college chum Gerald John Keane and Capitol Video Communications. “I’m 37 now and I started on this when I was 29. People tell me I’m crazy, (that I should) give it up, (that) it’s an obsession, to get on with my life. Well, I’m going to give it up Nov. 8.”

That’s Election Day, after which, Shanley fears with justification, that “The Made-for-TV Election” will be a ready-for-oblivion TV program.

Very rarely do the major TV networks air documentaries they haven’t made themselves. But that, Shanley insisted by phone from his Washington office, is not the main reason that “The Made-for-TV Election” has been rejected by the major networks, CNN, PBS, FOX and nearly every other TV outlet except cable’s Discovery Channel.

“It’s so at the center of how the Establishment media cover our government,” he said, “that people have just considered it too, I don’t know, radical.”

In other words, TV is not anxious to grant exposure to a program that criticizes TV. At least, that’s the word Shanley’s gotten from the distributor who’s knocked on nearly every TV door in hopes of placing the program.

Shanley said he and his partners, after much soul searching, rejected last week’s $12,000 offer from the admirable but relatively obscure Discovery Channel. He said the payment wouldn’t even meet the cost of getting the show ready for air, and he fears exposing it on the Discovery Channel probably would end whatever remote chance it had of being carried elsewhere.

The documentary has some flaws. Yet it is far more incisive and comprehensive than the cut-down version of “The Prime-Time President” (a British production) that aired on PBS. And it deserves to be seen by a large audience.

“The Made-for-TV Election” sometimes reaches too far, portraying the “networks” always as monoliths with a single aim and sensibility. Not true. And on paper, the program may appear dated.

Yet the relevance of this clever, innovative, perceptive, very entertaining and handsomely produced documentary extends to the current campaign. Right up to tonight.

In a particularly brilliant segment pertinent to the Bentsen/Quayle clash, for example, questions and answers from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan debating in 1980 are skillfully intercut with questions and answers from “Family Feud.” The point?

“Everything in the medium of television is becoming the same,” Shanley explained on the phone. “The debates have to compete with game shows and everything is moving the same way. The public is learning a language of symbols.”

So, just as “Family Feud’ contestants try guessing answers that will match answers given in a “survey,” even if they don’t agree, so do candidates in televised debates tailor their statements to match the perceived opinions of a majority of viewers.

Even if they don’t agree.

Unchanged also from 1980 is the networks’ heavy reliance on polls in their campaign coverage (they tend to report only their own polls, as if those of competitors were not newsworthy) and the often judgmental reporting of TV reporters.

What has changed, one hopes, is Walter Cronkite’s assessment of TV’s role in presidential campaigns. Viewed through today’s eyes, the statement he makes in “The Made-for-TV Election” appears incredibly naive and narrow:

“We’re not in any way responsible for the conduct of the candidates. We’re responsible only for reporting what the candidates do--holding up the mirror.”

Make that a fun-house mirror, given TV’s ravenous appetite for campaign snapshots and one-liners that the candidates and their staffs feed, day in and day out.

What an odyssey this has been for Shanley, since he and Keane (both were TV technicians on the 1976 Carter campaign staff) began their 100,000-mile campaign shoot for a program that may end up being as unsalable as a failed candidate. They started out with an investment of $10,000 each, Keane handling the camera, Shanley the sound. They shot 57 interviews, the last with Carter in 1983.

“The reason it has taken so long is that we didn’t have any organization backing us,” said Shanley, echoing the plight of most independent producers. “We were constantly going to foundations and potential underwriters to get sponsorship.”

Meanwhile, “The Made-for-TV Election” is being sold as a video through advertisements in trade magazines, with most of the purchases made by high schools and universities.

“Some days I have one order, other days 10,” Shanley said. “I don’t want this to be sad story, but I don’t think this thing has any life after the election.”

Survey says? Stay tuned.