Duke, Johnson: Messengers and the Medium

How ironic that Magic Johnson and David Duke should have anything in common besides gender. But they do. Both are relatively young, nice looking, boyishly charming, persuasive and camera ready. And in using TV to sell their causes, both call attention to perils.

It is here that the common denominators end, however, for Johnson’s cause is AIDS. Unless Duke is the reborn humanitarian that he claims, his cause is hate.

Johnson is the most visible, potentially most effective poster-person to date for the war against the menacing HIV that he has contracted.

Duke adorns a different poster.

As Phil Donahue announced this week: “David Duke is here!” Is he ever, reminding us through his appearances on such shows as Donahue’s that the old saw about the camera never lying is itself a big lie.

The polls show Duke now falling behind former Democratic Gov. Edwin W. Edwards in the Louisiana gubernatorial campaign. Yet even if he loses Saturday’s election, Duke’s strong candidacy will have affirmed TV’s vulnerability to being exploited by a camera-smooth demagogue whose well-documented past--as a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Nazi advocate--would have sunk most other candidates. Has Duke really reformed so quickly? All logic says no. On TV, though, he is very, very persuasive.

This guy is good, dangerously good.

For one thing, Duke is disarmingly soft-spoken. Despite being verbally assaulted in a spate of recent TV appearances, he has lost his composure only once, when in a brief flash of anger he called co-host Michael Kinsley a “little worm” during CNN’s “Crossfire.” More typical was his appearance on “Donahue,” where he genially addressed females in the studio audience--even those attacking him--as “ma’am.” Yes, just a nice Southern boy being victimized by liberals.

For another thing, Duke historically has been one of the most facile liars ever to face a camera. Only recently, his former campaign manager called him a chameleon. He does indeed tailor himself to fit the TV occasion, but unless you’ve seen all his TV appearances, you don’t pick it up. And unless TV interviewers watch him on other shows--and apparently few do--they rarely can challenge him. (Ted Koppel is scheduled to take his shot on ABC’s “Nightline” tonight.)

Even when they do, he is so verbally adept at evading harm that he skitters away untouched.

NBC “Today” co-host Bryant Gumbel to Duke: “To what extent, sir, do you think you’re participating in the politics of race?” Immediately, the fast-talking Duke was floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, advocating “equal rights for all” while attacking “liberals” and welfare and making a speech: “We’ve got to start helping everyone.” Well, who would disagree with that?

Even when unable to name the top three employers in Louisiana in response to a question on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he somehow gave the impression of being victimized by the media.

By the end of “Donahue,” despite being confronted with every skeleton in his past, Duke was somehow sounding reasonable and moderate. He knows the right buttons to push. “We all have a past,” he pleaded.

On KNBC Channel 4, meanwhile, reporter Linda Douglass affirmed that Duke’s appeal had reached beyond his own state by reporting that 947 Californians had contributed a total of $55,000 to his campaign.

So along with condemnation, perhaps Louisiana’s Republican candidate is due some thanks for sending rational Americans this wake-up call: In hard economic times, anything is possible. Even David Duke.

Say What? The subject was paid condom commercials, which Fox this week agreed to accept providing that they deal only with preventing the spread of AIDS and don’t promote contraception, and which ABC, CBS and NBC still reject, a policy the latter two say they’re now re-evaluating.

The interviewee was Michael Corken, general manager of NBC affiliate WTHR-TV in Indianapolis. Hoosiers are giving people. So Corken was generously sharing his narrowness with “Today” co-host Katie Couric in New York.

Despite the networks’ long-standing ban on condom commercials, both their affiliates and the stations they own have been free to air them locally if they wanted to, a subject that Couric was addressing with Corken.

He told her that WTHR rejected such ads on the basis that safer sex had been adequately covered by public-affairs programs. He mentioned the late Ryan White in that regard, failing to note that hemophiliac White contracted AIDS through blood-clotting treatment, not sex. In any event, Corken added, “trying to shove it (the topic) into 30 seconds is a little much, frankly.”

“Do you air commercials for foams and sponges?” Couric asked.

“Well, your network does, so it’s difficult for us not to,” he replied.

“And you don’t think that’s a double standard?” she asked, shaping her question virtually into a statement.

“No, I do not,” he replied unflinchingly.

At that point you wanted to check this guy’s brain waves to see if death had occurred.

If only Couric had gone one step further and asked him just why he believed that accepting paid ads for female contraceptives but not for male contraceptives represented equal treatment. As it turns out, NBC contradicts Corken, saying that it does not accept contraception ads of any kind. ABC and CBS say they have the same policy.

Corken added that he might consider accepting a condom commercial that was two minutes in length.

He might as well require condom manufacturers to buy infomercials. Perhaps he would prefer one along the lines of a segment that “Today” ran Tuesday in which Couric interviewed a sex educator who demonstrated the use of a condom on an anatomically correct model of an erect penis.

“Today” would not have been so brazen before Magic Johnson’s disclosure that he had contracted HIV. And this graphic segment may have served a useful purpose. But is NBC saying that this was appropriate and that less-specific condom ads are not?

It’s not station managers like Corken who are as much at fault here as NBC and the other networks, whose lead their local stations would surely follow were they to revoke their bans on condom commercials.

Mainstream TV must always be dragged kicking and shrieking into the bright light of reality. Implicit even in Fox’s decision finally to relent on condom commercials is the fantasy that if such ads address themselves to only the health issue, viewers somehow will not make the connection with contraception. Huh?

It’s a little much, frankly.