Media Politics : Misgivings About TV-Driven Campaign : Symbols, Sound Bites--and Soul-Searching

Dan Rather sits on the set of “As the World Turns” in the center of a red, gray, blue and lavender temporary newsroom. And in small TV sets built into all four walls, Rather’s image is repeated 106 times, instant replay’s version of peripheral vision.

“We’ll have more details on that as the evening rolls along,” Rather says, “and see whether Michael Dukakis, with 241 electoral votes, can get the winning number 270.” Moments later, a different graphic flashes up on the screens around the room, and now George Bush is leading.

Rather and his network, CBS, are rehearsing their election night broadcast, that familiar roll of exit surveys, projected winners, spinning maps and pundits.

As the end of the most television-driven presidential race yet draws near, there is a sense that something is amiss, that the system has gotten out of hand, and that no one--not the candidates, nor the journalists nor the public--is satisfied with the politics in the television era.

Who is to blame? Were the networks foils to shrewdly manipulative campaigns again? If the networks know it, why can’t they just say no, and force these guys to face the issues? Or did the TV medium and its sound-bite logic ignore the candidates’ discussions of the issues, as the Bush campaign now charges?

Pondered Questions

Officials at CBS last week agreed to ponder these questions, and their answers reveal a few simple truths about media and today’s politics:

For one, campaigning has evolved into such an art form that, through television, candidates now use the media to speak directly to voters, communicating with symbols suited to the medium rather than with positions on the issues.

The prevailing view at CBS, too, is that networks lack the power, the resources or the right to change this by somehow refusing to air the staged events through which candidates deliver their symbolic messages. On occasion, though the press has simply objected, as it did this year when Bush capped a spate of events and commercials with patriotic themes by visiting a flag factory in New Jersey. But generally journalists at CBS think only voters and the political parties can transform the system, and until then the networks will likely do their best to cover campaigns in the traditional way.

If the networks tried anything else, campaigns might bypass the nightly news format too--through cable, local news or in live interviews. Increasingly, the old idea of media access, through press conferences or getting to know a candidate by traveling with his campaign, is becoming less important.

While the problems that have engendered this dissatisfaction extend to print media as well, they are most strikingly visible on television.

“I think the patient is breathing very hard,” said CBS political editor Brian Healy of the state of politics on television.

It begins first with the existing nightly news format in which the three networks have 22 minutes to tell the news in stories that average two minutes in length. Network officials say they want more, but local affiliates will not relinquish the time.

Then there is the nature of television. Since pictures generally carry more immediate power than words, TV communicates feelings better than ideas, especially in a short time.

Now enter the state-of-the-art political campaign, which turned to television to win votes directly from the public after the decline of party bosses and voter-delivering interest groups, such as unions.

Symbols, Not Issues

In the emotional and abbreviated format of network TV news, Healy conceded, candidates “choose to deal in symbols rather than issues, at least in a year when no overriding concerns have emerged.”

Thus in the TV era the Pledge of Allegiance personifies patriotism; candidates’ approach to defense echoes the societal divisions of the Vietnam War era. A prison furlough program personifies personal toughness, attitudes toward crime, and more.

Symbols are safe too, because they are vague. One can question points in a detailed plan to solve the deficit, Healy said. But who opposes the Pledge of Allegiance?

But it is in how candidates have learned to communicate those symbols that the most serious problems may arise with politics and television.

Former Bush Press Secretary Peter B. Teeley, for instance, talks proudly about how Bush is beating Dukakis on symbolic issues that “a lot of people in the press don’t understand.”

And the campaigns manage to communicate these symbols, essentially, by offering the press nothing but carefully staged campaign commercials to cover.

The candidates, for instance, now travel inside sealed cocoons, inaccessible to reporters, from which they emerge only two or three times a day to deliver a speech. They rarely give press conferences, and answer charges from their opponent only when they feel they must.

“What previously was a cotton cocoon is now made of titanium,” said Lane Vernardos, CBS executive producer, “and it is virtually impenetrable, even with a Sam Donaldson-like voice.”

Carefully Woven

The speeches, in turn, are carefully woven with only one or two new phrases, so the campaigns effectively control which lines the networks will use. And the speeches, of course, are staged against carefully arranged backdrops that visually reinforce the message. Even the crowds who hear the speech are there by invitation only.

Campaigns even call news “free media” and advertising “paid media,” reflecting the fact that, in significant part, daily campaigning has become the art of staging documentary commercials for newsmen, a kind of advertising verite.

Given the format of TV news, argued James Lake, senior communications adviser to the Bush campaign, “any prudent campaign manager knows he has to run a campaign this way. And if you don’t you’re a fool and your candidate is a loser.”

What then is the media to do? At CBS, Healy explained the network tried several methods to “neutralize” attempts to make it a conduit for campaign commercials.

Limit Pictures

One, simply, was trying to limit what pictures get on the air. When Bush went to a fish factory on Labor Day for no other reason than to suggest visually sympathy with working people, CBS refused to use the picture, except later in a story about manipulation of the media. CBS reacted the same way to Dukakis’ now-notorious tank ride.

Another strategy was to train the cameras on the handlers, and point out more of the media manipulation. A third was having correspondents do more on-camera stand-up introductions and conclusions, on the theory that people will pay more attention to reporters’ comments if the reporters are seen. Another plan was to use the technology of satellite feeds to send the correspondents footage from other places to incorporate into their stories from the road.

CBS put two of its most senior correspondents on the campaign buses, Bob Schieffer and Bruce Morton, thinking that they would be more likely to see the manipulations. ABC, too, has used senior correspondents, Brit Hume and Sam Donaldson. NBC also used White House correspondent Chris Wallace with Dukakis.

Finally, there is what Healy called the “third piece,” stories done off the campaign bus--those longer stories examining issues, checking the honesty of the campaign charges, looking at advertising and the candidates’ records.

“You have to have a parallel campaigning working, along with the campaign they’re running,” Healy said.

But even some at CBS think these tools have drastic limitations, and it is questionable to what extent they really neutralize the advertising quality of the modern campaign.

To begin with, it is impossible for the networks not to use the advertising-style pictures the campaigns stage, because the correspondents have nothing else to take pictures of.

For instance, when the networks split off from the campaigns each day to produce their stories, usually around 2 p.m., all they have on tape is about 25 minutes of the candidate, from two carefully staged speeches. Whatever part of it they air, the candidates, in a sense, win.

Another problem is the way TV pieces are constructed, Healy admitted. “Correspondents and producers are trained to make their packages (stories) look good, to communicate as much as you can quickly.”

Networks ‘Smarter’

And while the networks are now “smarter” about not being manipulated, still, Healy admitted, “you do try to symbolize what happened that day.”

There are limits to the third story too. “If you’re cobbling together a piece on issues, trying to bend your piece around existing material from the candidates who aren’t really addressing this, often you’re using something that is close but no cigar, and the viewer is left wandering around in a daze: ‘What was that all about?’ ” said Vernardos.

These independent pieces also take several days, and require usually more than three minutes on air, said CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl, the network’s primary correspondent running its parallel campaign.

Finally, many TV correspondents now are uncertain how much difference their words make, even in an on-camera stand-up, against the candidate’s pictures.

The correspondent may note that a candidate is lying or chanting slogans, but “none of that seems to penetrate (the viewer’s consciousness) as much as another 100,000 balloons dropping or a smiling, benign candidate,” Vernardos said, matter of factly.

Since 1984, when officials in the Reagan White House told Stahl they cared little about which words she spoke over their pictures, “it has been very disturbing and I’ve struggled for four years with the idea that the picture is so powerful,” Stahl said. “What is our role here?”

Rather himself, CBS’ anchorman and managing editor, said if this campaign was filled with lies and demagoguery, “we let them get away with it, and I just don’t mean television.

“Where was the courage, the independence, the determination to ask questions and keep on asking them all the way through?” Rather demanded.

Even some campaign operatives wonder why journalists do not simply get off the campaign bus.

“If you see an event that is a packaged event and you don’t think there is any news there, don’t cover it,” Teeley of the Bush campaign suggested. “Lets face it, 5 days out of 7 when these candidates are running around they are basically emphasizing the same things.”

‘Elitist, Arrogant’

“It would be elitist and arrogant to say I’m not going to pay attention to what the candidates are saying on the trail,” responded Healy.

“You do that at the risk of becoming part of the story yourself, which puts you at some significant peril in the long run,” said Vernardos.

“We do have a responsibility to tell people what these candidates are saying, even if they make no sense . . . or what they’re saying is totally irrelevant, because that in itself tells you something,” said correspondent Schieffer. “It is also news if a man wins by conducting that kind of a campaign.”

And the candidates will not change, many at CBS and elsewhere argue, until some politician emerges who can win by making himself accessible and running on specifics. Either that or the public refuses to vote for someone because they are fed up with the quality of national politics.

“Do I think democracy is served by campaigns that are reduced to 20-second sound-bites?” mused CBS political editor Healy. “No . . . We are all going to have to struggle to sort out what to do next time. And it’s not just television. The 20-second sound-bite, nine times out of 10, is now the first or second paragraph of the newspaper story.”