Where Entertainment Rules

Pity the poor news media. Here it was Tuesday night, with the networks already obligated to forego “Spin City,” “Frazier” and a made-for-TV movie so they could broadcast the State of the Union address, when all of a sudden, the jurors in O.J. Simpson’s civil trial announce they will deliver their verdict as soon as the parties can get to the courtroom. What’s a news director to do? Will it be President Bill Clinton or Simpson?

It was an excruciating decision--one the media were finally spared from having to make, when fortune smiled and the president delivered his peroration just as the verdicts were being announced. But even as the media narrowly escaped, their dilemma was becoming one of those signal moments in our cultural history, crystallizing as it did one of the central battles of our time: the battle between seriousness and celebrity salaciousness.

Even 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for any network news affiliate to preempt the State of the Union for a trial verdict. The old network news departments prided themselves on their journalistic integrity. They had standards and set priorities. They helped provide a public record. Had the same conflict occurred back then, it is likely the State of the Union would have been thoroughly covered, a brief report on the Simpson verdicts would have been provided and the analysis of the speech would have proceeded, with commentators enumerating the items on the president’s political wish list and laying the odds of his getting them.

Tuesday, the media’s priorities were immediately apparent, too. Only this time no one seemed remotely interested in the speech that had laid out Clinton’s agenda for his second term. Even commentators assembled expressly to expound on it began taking about Simpson instead--all the old race business--and no commentator I heard said, “Screw O.J. let’s talk about the president.” To the contrary, NBC shunted Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts’ GOP response into the sermonette slot so we could get more Simpson, and ABC’s “Nightline” devoted an hour to Simpson, without a mention of the speech. Clearly, this time around, the president didn’t matter.

Yet, if one really looked, one might have found not only a symbolic relationship between the two events but some cause and effect. The president was speaking in the lofty but dull rhetoric of public policy. He was laying out a theme of responsibility and calling us to social purpose. He was even, ironically in light of the Simpson verdicts bearing down on him, placing his highest priority on education.

What he was really saying, though, is that we face seemingly intractable problems and that the solutions will be difficult. It’s not an especially heartening message, and Americans may be forgiven for preferring Simpson. There’s nothing fun about public policy. Most of the time there’s not even any readily apparent payoff. Excepting those rare moments of national crisis, progress in public affairs is almost always incremental, sometimes geologically so, and the results are usually subtle. You don’t measure the success of education policy, for example, in months or years, but in decades.

But if we can’t have excitement in the things that really matter, we have come to demand it in the things that don’t. We live in a society that militates for the fast rather than the protracted, the simple rather than the complex, the cataclysmic rather than the incremental. We want action, and these days we certainly aren’t wanting for providers.

While one would hope that the mainstream news media might at least be exempt from the rush toward providing instant gratification, it is Pollyannaish to think so. No less than Hollywood movies and TV sitcoms, the news media now seem determined to feed our insatiable hunger to be entertained. That’s why the networks were itching to cut away from Capitol Hill to Santa Monica and those juicy verdicts. And that’s why, when it first seemed the verdicts might overlap, one local Los Angeles anchorwoman promised to “bring you coverage of what the president has to say after the speech.” All this only underscores that entertainment is the primary force of our society, Simpson merely another show and the news another entertainment medium.

Of course, when they’re giving speeches, newscasters often deplore this state of affairs, because to do so is expected of them--just as it’s expected they will cover the State of the Union. But, in truth, entertainment is something the news media have grown increasingly comfortable with. The stories that get covered most are those with the highest entertainment value: Simpson, Whitewater, the Dick Morris escapade, anything with a winner and loser and conflict. Sex is good, too. Public-policy issues, on the other hand, like those aired in the State of the Union, are yawners. You can practically hear the toilets flushing.

Since form invariably follows function, even the method of covering the news now owes as much to entertainment and sports as to journalism. It’s personality driven--like the Simpson case. Or it’s driven by titillation, as in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case. Or it’s driven by “visuals” that play well. That’s why, every week or so, we get a video on the news of some skydiver whose parachute didn’t open or some high-speed car chase--events that, in themselves, aren’t newsworthy but gain newsworthiness only because we’ve got the pictures. Even the endless analyses of the Simpson case comes out of sports, not news. The Simpson experts are simply legal “color men,” telling us who’s winning or losing.

Nowhere is this more evident than when the media deal with the world of celebrity. Celebrities, even minor ones like Simpson, are the new stars of the life movie that the news media now cover and against which serious issues can’t compete. If visuals make otherwise unnewsworthy events newsworthy, the participation of a celebrity in anything--an accident, a wedding, a lawsuit, a custody battle, a drinking bout--immediately bestows newsworthiness on it. The news used to be a recitation of the day’s occurrences. With celebrity, it’s become a star vehicle--and big vehicles can drive other news right off the screen.

Everyone knows this is so, but seldom have we had as dramatic an example of the difference between the old journalistic tradition and the new entertainment-driven media as Tuesday night’s coverage. And seldom have we had as conclusive a demonstration as to which has triumphed. Even those cynics among us who understand the news media are only satisfying demand in giving us hours of Simpson coverage might have expected them to exercise some restraint, if only out of journalistic atavism.

Not any more. To the media, the State of the Union was, finally, a nuisance, a responsibility to fulfill before they could turn to the good stuff. Simpson was their story because it had glamour, drama, suspense. The State of the Union was just a way to kill time.

But the media should at least acknowledge that, in any larger context, their Simpson coverage is just killing time while real life happens. In real life, the outcome of the Simpson trial will have virtually no effect on any of us--certainly less than the effect that one Pell grant, to cite a program Clinton promised in his speech to expand, will have on the life of the student who receives it.

Effects, though, don’t seem to matter. In the face of celebrity drama, everything else must surrender, including now, it seems, the president’s plans for the nation’s future. If it’s excitement we want, the media decided Tuesday, they are going to deliver. After all, what’s another State of the Union address when you can have O.J.?