Moyers’ ‘Public Mind’ Offers a Perceptive View of TV Newscasts

Local news icon Jerry Dunphy and his latest partner, Pat Harvey, peered from a full-page ad that visually overshadowed everything else in the newspaper, inviting you to watch their debut Monday on their new broadcast home, KHJ-TV Channel 9. Dunphy, from KABC-TV Channel 7, and Harvey, from WGN-TV in Chicago, are known as news anchors, the advance designated superstars of Channel 9’s expanded three-hour newscast, now delayed until March 5.

More than anything, however, they’re in sales.

So, too, are most of their colleagues and counterparts--gleaming, upscale versions of auto-peddling Cal Worthington. As the 1990s beckon, there’s no longer any doubt that the news media’s most pervasive and influential component--television--is now more goal-oriented and singularly focused than ever. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

The main purpose of television news is to sell television news.

Designed primarily as a vehicle to attract a mass audience, the newscast at its core has become the commercial that separates the other commercials. It’s a chip off the old block, for television itself is a relentless huckster, saturating America with pleasing, entertaining images--from news anchors to toothpaste to political candidates--that help shape public opinion and tastes by merging fact and fiction. We’re being suffocated by sales messages and subtle manipulations in infinite forms. Instead of counting sheep, we go to sleep counting Burma Shave signs.

The point is dramatically made in “The Public Mind,” a profound, acutely perceptive, four-part PBS series from Bill Moyers premiering at 9 tonight on Channels 28 and 15, and at 8 on Channel 58.

Commercials have become the “Communion wafer of the marketplace,” Moyers says tonight. And what isn’t a commercial these days? The children’s program created to market a toy is a commercial. The talk show advertising actors and authors is a commercial. The anchor advertising a newscast that advertises him even as it airs is a commercial. President George Bush kissing a puppy is a commercial.

The Moyers series is a commercial for candor. Here is where the truth hits the fan. Utilizing insights from media members, media manipulators and media observers, here is a series loaded with sharp edges and brawny points of view, a series that has its own message to sell. It makes a persuasive case for critical awareness and skepticism, not only about Madison Avenue and the media (TV offers “buyer-beware journalism,” says Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts), but also about a government whose media-tailored, feel-good imagery clashes with reality.

Behind the visual images, Moyers charges, “the government rots.” He should learn to be more direct.

Although the series’ four shows on successive Wednesdays are separately titled (tonight’s is “Consuming Images,” followed by “Leading Questions,” “Illusions of News” and “The Truth About Lies”), they overlap. One of Moyers’ headlines--that the picture is everything--is not news. Throughout this series, however, he gives example after example of how that old saw, “the camera never lies,” is itself a lie.

Calling many of the camera shots, in effect, are professional pollsters whose market research is a tool of persuasion in commercial and political arenas that embrace every aspect of American culture. Networks and stations are not the only ones that measure public response to their news anchors, we learn from next week’s “Leading Questions.” Richard Wirthlin, former pollster for President Ronald Reagan, says the White House compiled a “thermometer rating” of NBC’s Tom Brokaw to gauge public attitudes about him in various areas. The implication is that the flow of news can be manipulated by having a pollster choose the anchor best-suited to the President’s or candidate’s purposes.

The purpose of images--whether in politics, news or fashion--is to define importance and unimportance. They have “built into them an attitude of persuasion,” Stuart Ewen of Hunter College says tonight. The danger comes when our realities are lost in their realities.

The other night on TV, designer Bill Blass was saying that the narrow-shouldered look is in for women because they are tired of the bulky, big-shouldered look. Translation: Switching directions in fashion stimulates sales. So convince women they’re tired of what they’re wearing. Do that by creating new visual images they will want to imitate.

Copy the image or share the fantasy, then “you too can enter into the spectacle,” says Ewen. Almost as an actor in a play. The play is all around us, from music videos to newscasts. Argues Ewen: “Built into the job of putting on a news program is the recognition that the success or failure of that news program has very little to do with the coverage of events, with the way in which that program, in fact, empowers people, provides people with information which will allow them to think about what’s happening in their worlds, to understand connections between seemingly separate events. . . .”

KCBS-TV Channel 2 news director Michael Singer tonight defends his own local newscasts, conceding that methods to attract viewers are “often sleazy and unprincipled,” but adding, “They don’t have a direct effect on me or the newscast we’re doing.”

Although omitted here, contradicting him are the anchor-celebrating news promos run by KCBS--which elevate messenger above message--and such distracting choreography as having 5 p.m. anchors Jim Lampley and Bree Walker stand and, in effect, introduce the 6 p.m. newscast like co-hosts of a theatrical production.

Appropriately, perhaps--for “viewers are primed to be entertained,” Moyers notes later in the series. That entertainment has become institutionalized in TV news is as understood by politicians as news executives themselves.

“We absolutely thought of ourselves . . . as producers,” former Reagan adviser Michael Deaver recalls almost gloatingly in “Illusions of News,” referring to the selling of his boss, mainly through TV. For example, take something as innocuous as Reagan popping jelly beans: a “prop that symbolized apple pie,” according to Deaver.

Deaver and his colleagues above all understood the power of pictures and their value to TV--that one jelly bean was worth a thousand words. That is the main theme of the third segment, mostly an ‘80s scrapbook of Presidential campaigns in which ideas and issues are pushed aside by a flood of visual images that Moyers notes “suggest a lot but tell us nothing.”

It takes two to play the game, however. Lesley Stahl of CBS News again recalls her 1984 election story in which patriotic pictures of President Reagan eclipsed her critical narrative about his campaign being built on fluff and soothing visual images. This capacity of pictures to overpower words is the basic flaw of TV news.

Nevertheless, Stahl goes on to describe her desire to “wallpaper” her stories with pictures that capture the viewer’s eye. “I like my pieces to have energy,” she says. Pieces with energy get on the air. Viewers like energy. Everybody is happy.

If it’s true, as Moyers says, that America “mostly got images the candidates wanted us to see on the news,” what we don’t know is what portion of the public actually fell for the trickery. In any event, TV itself gets part of the blame for this phoniness. Why should candidates bother making speeches about issues when usually only their media stunts and catchy sound bites make the newscast? TV virtually invites them to be superficial.

Viewers want “feel-good and fuzz,” Deaver says. Whether he’s right or wrong, in too many cases that’s exactly what they get.