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C-SPANBy John Ramos
It's not easy, moderating a vice-presidential debate. At shortly before 9 p.m. on October 5, on the campus of Centre College in Kentucky, Bernard "Bernie" Shaw, venerable frost-topped CNN anchorman, was laying down the law. Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman would be out shortly, he informed the packed auditorium, and what he expected of the audience went "without saying": "No outbursts, no demonstrations, no distractions whatsoever from what these two fine American public servants will be discussing. They simply won't be tolerated." Strolling professorially back and forth across the red-carpeted stage, Bernie laid out his vision for the night's proceedings. "As your fellow American, what I will be a very minor part of on the stage tonight is very important. As a journalist, I take my responsibility very, very seriously, just as you take your following of our political process very seriously. So I will be more or less a facilitator tonight. I will pose questions to the candidates that I have worked on, and I will get out of their way, to that they can respond to issues in the minds of all Americans." It was time to meet the candidates. Joe Lieberman entered stage right. Dick Cheney stage left. As the applause rose and fell, the two men took their seats at a table in the center of the stage. Bernie sat down facing them, his back to the audience. He wasn't in the mood for any procrastination. "I've got a lot of territory to cover tonight," he told them. "I hope we can move with dispatch." Showtime was seven minutes away. Each candidate would have two minutes to answer a question, and the other candidate would have two minutes to rebut. Lieberman asked Bernie about the possibility of having extended discussion on certain issues. "It's at my discretion," Bernie said. "As I listen to you very, very carefully, if I think that something should be expanded on—or if one of you is just seized with, you know, unstoppable passion—ah, you know . . . but, um, I think we'll cover a lot of questions." And that was that. The men fell silent. At three minutes to nine, as television networks around the country launched their final pre-debate wave of commercials, a minor crisis: Bernie lost sight of his Teleprompter. Leaning forward, he began a tense conversation with an invisible producer. "Marty? I have a question. Okay, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Marty? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Nothing like live television. . . ah, I need this prompter on. It's shielded right now." The audience and the candidates stayed obediently quiet while Bernie and Marty worked it out. Long moments later, the problem was resolved. The camera lights went green at nine o'clock. Bernie sat up straight and welcomed the TV audience of America to the debate. After introducing the candidates and sternly admonishing the audience once again to be silent, he fixed his dignified eyes on Joe Lieberman and began. "Senator, few hard-working Americans would base their well-being on bonuses they hoped to get five or ten years from now. Why do you—and you, Secretary Cheney—predict surpluses you cannot possibly guarantee, to pay for your proposed programs?" Lieberman opened his mouth, and for the next hour and a half, the blah-blah-blahing never really stopped.
In studying this little campaign-trail vignette, it is interesting to note Bernard Shaw's egotism. Despite his stated intention to ask questions and "get out of the way," Bernie plants himself squarely in the way of rational debate with his very first question. He begins with an unprovable assumption ("Few hard-working Americans would base their well-being on bonuses they hoped to get five or ten years from now"), stains the question with sentimentality ("hard-working" Americans), and winds up by accusing the candidates of making promises which they "cannot possibly" guarantee. Bernie, it seems, has confused the role of moderator with that of dictator. He doesn't ask the audience to be quiet; he tells them. He doesn't ask the candidates to "move with dispatch"; he warns them to do so. And throughout the ninety minutes of the debate, Bernie Shaw (a man who takes his journalism "very, very seriously") continues to lard his questions with assumptions and editorial comment.
"Cauldron"? "Magic bullet"? It is hard to detect a specific ideological slant to these questions, but clearly a bias exists—call it a bias of personality. Dramatic overstatement ("The American people have had enough.") mixed with tired cliche, trying to pass itself off as journalism, is a direct result of the corporate news networks' almost pathological need to entertain. "DECISION 2000!" shriek our television screens in spinning red, white and blue letters. "BATTLE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE!" Action-adventure music jams in the background and computer-generated stars fly ecstatically across the screen as a variety of attractive newspeople give us the latest developments. The networks, in their zeal to compete for viewers, have transformed news (that is, reality) into a spectacle of music, animation and performance, a corporate Mcproduct designed to be gulped down whole by a bored, ironic public. In news, as in other sectors of the entertainment industry, presentation is far more important than content; and nothing improves presentation of the news like a handsome talking head reading it to us, giving the news a "spin," a personalized "flavor," which helps us to distinguish it from the nearly identical offerings of competing networks. Ted Koppel, speaking recently at the Miami Book Fair about his book Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public, told how a "magic moment" occurs partway through an interview with a tough guest, when the viewing audience of America, with whom Ted apparently has a extrasensory connection, "starts to lose patience with me." "Why are you being so soft on this guy?" Ted imagines us yelling at him from living rooms all over the country. "Get in there and ask him some questions!" Though we in the audience start out by identifying with Ted (Ted tells us that he is our "surrogate"), at the "magic moment" of connection, he starts to identify with us, and "that's when I move in." Identification with audiences is a marked trait of TV newspeople. Just as companies make an enormous effort to give consumers products that they "want," from dripless ketchup bottles to a more powerful drain cleaner, TV newspeople perceive themselves as being similarly "wanted" by their audiences, as embodying, in all of their various features and characteristics, exactly what the people are looking for. Accurate or not, this identification is the identification of a product with its consumer—but TV people, unlike cans of Coke, are human, with all too human tendencies toward vanity and self-importance. It is only a short leap from the realization that one is liked by an audience to the conviction that one speaks for an audience. Thus we have Bernie Shaw, "your fellow American," enthroned in the moderator's chair, spouting off to the candidates about what "we all know" and lecturing them for their failure to "elevate political discourse." And if we had any nagging doubts going in as to the perfection of the symbiosis between Mr. Shaw and ourselves, Bernie dispelled them in his pre-debate remarks, when he loftily informed the assembled multitude of his belief that by asking the candidates questions which "I have worked on," he, Bernard Shaw, would be speaking for "all Americans."
Of course, crappy journalism and pomposity are nothing new in the world. What is more remarkable about Bernie Shaw's pre-debate performance, perhaps, than the insight it provides into his character, is that so few people were given the opportunity to witness it. It was not aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX, or any other commercial network, all of which were busily interviewing pundits. Only two groups of people were privileged to witness history exactly as it unfolded: the people sitting in the debate hall itself . . . and viewers of C-SPAN. C-SPAN, alone among the networks, provides context for the events it covers. The commercial networks, despite their vast assemblages of cameras and microphones and lights, despite their armies of video technicians and sound mixers, despite their millions of viewers, often seem to labor under the weird assumption that their presence has no effect on the events they are reporting. Thus can George W. Bush order a cheeseburger in a small-town restaurant and have the event recorded in exactly that way—"George eats a burger"—with little or no attention being paid to the mob of journalists jammed up behind the counter recording it. We know they're there, and they know we know, but so carefully do they stay out of the picture that the whole situation begins to smack of charade, a twirling courtship dance between government and media which has no apparent purpose other than to produce folksy, ad-selling myths about our leaders. Thus can Al Gore play touch football with his family on the day after the election and have pictures of the game appear in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report within the week, all bearing versions of the caption "Al Gore unwinds." But however often and loudly a network like Fox News may boast (between commercials) that "We Report. You decide.", C-SPAN, with no fanfare or commentary, consistently does just that. In addition to running live footage of event locations before the events begin, C-SPAN cameras periodically pan over audiences and even turn on themselves as the events progress, covering the story in its totality, and allowing us, truly, to decide. C-SPAN (and its sister network C-SPAN2, where I witnessed Ted Koppel's "magic moment") throws open the door on public affairs in America. All proceedings in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate are carried live by C-SPAN, along with subcommittee hearings, press conferences, campaign rallies, stump speeches, presidential events, book-signings, conventions, seminars, symposiums, and gabfests of every political stripe. C-SPAN has gone to Sing Sing Prison, to third-party presidential debates, into nuclear submarines, and to the burial sites of every U.S. President. When protestors disrupted the scene at the Democratic National Convention, C-SPAN was there, walking around in the middle of it. When police led Ralph Nader away from the first presidential debate, C-SPAN was there. C-SPAN carries the proceedings of the British House of Commons and airs a variety of foreign television broadcasts. C-SPAN interviews everybody from constitutional scholars to campaign-trail luggage handlers to Dave Barry. When I woke up this afternoon and turned on C-SPAN, they were filming Bush and Gore supporters outside of the Leon County Circuit Courthouse in Florida. A man waving an Israeli flag saw the camera and started yelling, "President Bush! Staten Island loves you, baby!" A woman on the Democratic side started playing an acoustic guitar, singing, "We shall overcome, we shall overcome . . . " The flag-waver picked up the tune and began singing, his own version: "Bush, Bush, Bush . . ." In the center of the lawn, a fat man stood with a wooden cross towering high over his head, shouting at everyone. This brief look at real life was far more refreshing a wake-up tonic than anything that Wolf or Cokie might have had to say. C-SPAN (which stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network) was different from its beginning. Founded in 1979 by Brian Lamb to provide coverage of the House of Representatives and "to provide elected and appointed officials . . . a direct conduit to the audience without filtering or otherwise distorting their points of view," C-SPAN does not run commercials and receives no public funding. The network is financed entirely by the cable television industry as a public service, presumably with the idea that C-SPAN will add value to a given lineup of channels. Judging by the strong hold C-SPAN has on the minds of its many junkies, this idea is sound. A brief listen to Washington Journal, C-SPAN's morning call-in program, reveals that C-SPAN callers spend an inordinate amount of their time thanking C-SPAN for its very existence. "Objective," "balanced," "fair," and "even-handed" are terms that appear frequently in their praise. C-SPAN is nonprofit, and the cable television industry exerts no editorial control over programming. The hosts of Washington Journal—including, notably, Brian Lamb himself (when did you last see the president of ABC or CBS hosting a call-in show?)—clearly appreciate the praise they receive from their callers, but they don't wallow in it, or speak of "connecting" with anyone. C-SPAN has one phone line for Democrats, one for Republicans, and one for independents. The numbers are not toll-free. The hosts take calls one after another, treating each caller alike and thanking each for their comments, even if they happen to be raving like lunatics. C-SPAN hosts never speak their own names aloud on the air. The questions they ask their guests are intelligent without being partisan. The guests themselves are under no such constraints. It is not uncommon for furious arguments to erupt over the Washington Journal table as guests go after each other with everything they have, while the host sits calmly between them, straightening papers. Oddly for an organization of its size and influence (in 1997, C-SPAN was available to 77 million cable subscribers, 22 million of whom watched the channel regularly), C-SPAN remains virtually exempt from criticism. No one complains about the waste of public money, because no public money is involved. No one complains about commercialism, because there are no commercials. And no one complains about bias, because members of every ideological perspective are represented on C-SPAN's programs. Indeed, about the only real objection that exists to counterbalance the soaring accolades of C-SPAN's true believers comes from the likes of Don Imus, Paula Poundstone, and other members of the entertainment industry, who accuse C-SPAN, in their own witty ways, of being "boring." "Sticks and stones will break my bones," writes Poundstone in Mother Jones magazine, "but watching 20 hours of C-SPAN almost sucked every drop of life from my body." Grouchy populist media critic Joe Queenan, writing in his "Average Joe" column in TV Guide, described to readers in 1998 how he spent "the longest day of my life" watching C-SPAN and C-SPAN2.
Setting aside for a moment the fact that entertainers make their livings by being against boringness, a second reading of Joe Queenan's criticism reveals a flaw so basic and glaring as to throw everything that Joe Queenan has said in his life into doubt, and to forever destroy any credibility which he might possess. Persecuted Scientologists in Germany? Racists in the hinterland? Al D'Amato trading absurdities with John Travolta? This stuff isn't boring at all, Joe. It's interesting. And C-SPAN viewers (bless their wacky little hearts) know it. ___________ |
