TELEVISION ANALYSIS : Pundits Drone When All Is Said and Done

This week’s Democratic National Convention hemorrhaged media talkers the way politicians bleed false promises.

Like predators, they waited in their glass-windowed booths overlooking the convention floor Thursday night, ready with thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether Democratic nominee Bill Clinton’s acceptance speech satisfied their own criteria for being presidential.

All week they oozed, they schmoozed. They analyzed, they autopsied. They proliferated, they pontificated and, above all, they polluted.

When it comes to metaphors, this was a convention where the pundit ticket of Gergen/Shields on PBS got more television time than the Democratic ticket of Clinton/Gore. A convention where TV Sam Donaldsoned, John Chancellored, Bill Moyered, Jack Germonded, Robert Novacked, “Crossfired” and “Capital Ganged” the daylights out of you.

Vice presidential nominee Al Gore easily might have been referring to some media as well as the Bush Administration when he repeated again and again in his acceptance speech Thursday night: “They must go!”

In fact, the most striking message emerging from the convention’s TV coverage was this: The less you know, the more air time you get to blab about it. And if repeated frequently, the blabbing assumes a life of its own and gains acceptance as reality.

Thereafter, it bears the stamp of Conventional Wisdom (CW).

CW is a close cousin to the “they say” syndrome, in which truisms are attributed to those anonymous acute observers of the human condition known as “they.” Although these CW sages are never identified, presumably “they” know who they are.

No longer anonymous, this week’s “they” were the pundits.

For several years now, some journalists have been tracing the growth of CW. One of them, Robert Parry, writes in his new book “Fooling America” about its creepy, crawly spread. CW “came to define the boundaries of permissible thinking within the journalistic and government communities of Washington,” Parry says. It was “what everybody simply knew to be true,” he adds. “It was the enforcement mechanism for the city’s passion for conformity.”

Speaking of conformity, Parry describes the “undistinguished thinkers who landed spots on television punditry shows where they got to expound on their ‘insider’ insights.” It was just such “insights” that typified much of the convention’s TV coverage.

In our last television check of the prevailing CW at Wednesday’s session, pundits galore were queuing up to predict that an immediate pullout by unannounced presidential candidate Ross Perot would maim the Clinton-Gore ticket more than the Bush-Quayle ticket. It’s not that some of these knee-jerk oracles aren’t smart, only that the requirements of the job are that they say something. Anything. And fast.

On Thursday morning, when the Perot withdrawal came, almost immediately the spin and speculation hit the fan.

“This announcement today has given the Democrats an extraordinary opportunity,” Moyers said on CNN. “Bush can win,” said Germond on CNN. “It’s a character and trust issue,” said Donaldson on ABC. His colleague David Brinkley weighed in, too, saying everything’s “so bad.” From the convention floor, NBC’s John Cochran said: “I think Ross Perot’s pulling out hurt George Bush.”

Throughout the day, yadda, yadda, yadda.

With the exception of C-SPAN, the networks covering the convention pressed almost everyone they could reach into service as a pundit, with predictable questions drawing predictable answers. Yes, said a Bush campaign adviser, Perot dropping out “is very good news for us.”

A loud cheer, though, for ABC’s podium reporter James Wooten. “I’m surrounded by Democratic spin meisters,” he said Thursday night. “They are saying a two-way race is a blessing for Bill Clinton. These are the same geniuses who were saying yesterday that a three-way race was a blessing for Bill Clinton. They don’t know, and I don’t know, either.”

The admission was the mark of a genuine pundit.