Art of the Essay Lives at ‘NewsHour’

Television: Those few minutes of the PBS show often resonate infinitely, the best compelling you to follow the cross-patterns of the human experience.

At once fleeting and forgettable, television moments usually whooshhhhhh by in a blur, making screeching pit stops in your brain and then zooming off again, out of sight, out of memory.

One that still lingers, though--an inspired confluence of sounds and sights as indelible as anything can be--aired on “The MacNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour” on Oct. 16, 1990. The familiar, sentimental music was from the Ken Burns documentary series “The Civil War,” its background melody haunting the words that a young Rhode Island officer wrote to his wife shortly before dying in the Battle of Bull Run.

“Never forget how much I love you. . . ,” wrote Sullivan Balleu.

Yet on the screen were not the faded black-and-white scrapbook snapshots of young soldiers who fought for the Union or Confederacy at Manassas or Shiloh or Antietam, but the images of U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf, freeze-framed for history in their desert-camouflage fatigues while beaming their “Hi, moms” to the folks back home.

And the accompanying voice-over came not from “The Civil War” narrator David McCullough but from Roger Rosenblatt, who, in a few remarkable, era-hurdling minutes of overlapped realities, somehow compressed two distinctly different wars, separated by some 130 years, into a single emotional experience whose common denominator was the human factor.

Those televised messages from the Gulf, Rosenblatt concluded, were no less meaningful than Sullivan Balleu’s letter, personifying “all the histories of soldiers who have known what permanent darkness they face, who pray to survive the terrible business of killing, to return to their homes where words go without saying.”

Wow!

Although running a mere four to seven minutes and airing an average of only once a week, the personal essays concluding some installments of the “NewsHour” on PBS often resonate infinitely, the best of them compelling you to enter the 3-D universe of history’s virtual reality and follow the cross-patterns of the entire human experience. Rarely on television are words so esteemed, and so artfully and memorably intersected with pictures.

Recently on the “NewsHour,” that process included wallpapering the screen with female faces for Ann Taylor Fleming’s moving essay connecting the rape of women in Bosnia (“some of them over . . . and over . . . and over”) to the United States (“where a woman is raped every six minutes”).

To emphasize what the assaulted women had lost, “NewsHour” showed the faces of Bosnian females who hadn’t been victimized, looking young and vibrant. In contrast, the women brutalized by occupation forces bore a deep, impenetrable sadness, their faces road-maps of misery that marked them as living dead.

“Looking at them,” Fleming said, “I cannot imagine how they will heal.”

Instead of experiencing the tragedy that Fleming was describing as an abstraction--how many of TV’s horrors can be absorbed without desensitization setting in?--you felt enclosed by her vision, drawn by these words and pictures into an alien, befuddling chaos where sorrow was routine.

Among the “NewsHour” essayists, none is more passionate or eloquent than Richard Rodriguez, an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco. We “romanticize the Indian who no longer exists,” he said in a beautifully crafted essay on Columbus Day, “and ignore the Indian who does. The Indian who is forced to chop down his rain forests, for example. Or the Indian who refuses to practice birth control.”

How textured yet seamless are these gems of graceful commentary--a cobbling of many components, yet giving the impression of a single, guiding hand. A mis impression, actually, for the process that begins with the 10 essayists (others are Timothy Ferris, Amei Wallach, Jim Fisher, Clarence Page, Jack Perkins, Phyllis Theroux and Robert Maynard) ends with Mike Saltz.

Senior producer for the “NewsHour” essays since their inception a decade ago, it’s Saltz who gives them body and shape. He likens what he does to making music videos: “They give me the lyrics, and I provide the melody.” In other words, it’s the essayists’ words, his production.

“We try to keep the responsibility for pictures away from the essayists,” Saltz said from New York. “None of them have been picked because they write scripts. For the most part, we have stayed away from people who have had extensive television experience. We’re interested in the essay as a literary style as opposed to a video style. We’re more interested in ideas than in pictures.”

Even though they appear to coexist amiably on “NewsHour,” the words-versus-pictures battle is usually a mismatch on TV. “No matter what happens, the image overtakes the words,” Rosenblatt said from New York, where he’s a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine and the only “News-Hour” essayist on staff.

Like all nightly newscasts, moreover, “NewsHour” is a factory, Saltz notes. And to a writer, surrendering words to an assembly line for someone else to visually package is like relinquishing children for adoption. “They trust us to understand what they are trying to communicate,” said Saltz.

“The guy (Saltz) is fabulous,” says Fleming, who lives in Los Angeles. “I’m always pleasantly surprised by something he invents on top of the words,” said Rosenblatt, a charter essayist along with Kansas City Star columnist Fisher.

In a recent piece for “News-Hour,” Newsday art critic Wallach defined great art as something in which “an idea has found its perfect visual form.” On television, nothing comes closer to that ideal than these essays.