VLVL politics & TV

[pynchonoid]

A process not completely unlike the one that leads to
Zoyd's defenestration packaged and promoted as a
ratings-earner on the evening news...


What's Wrong with the Presidency (And What Can Be Done
to Fix It)
By Lewis L. Gould 
Mr. Gould is the author of 1968: The Election That
Changed America, Lady Bird Johnson: Our Environmental
First Lady and The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
He is currently working on a history of the Republican
Party.

[...] first radio, then television came into the press
conferences, until under Jack Kennedy the press
sessions became popular prime-time entertainment. Then
commenced a slow decline in the number of such
conferences under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
accompanied by a more elaborate staging of them as
media events. Now such press conferences, when they
occur, are spectacles that presidents hold as rarely
as possible. Their purpose is no longer to make news
or convey information but to portray the president as
on top of his job. The White House manages the
proceedings with choreography worthy of a ballet,
journalists have their seating arranged with great
care, and recalcitrant journalists are punished for
impertinent queries. 

Why did all this occur? In my judgment, the emergence
of television and the mass media, with their premiums
on simplicity and brevity of issues, the short
attention span of a television audience, and the need
to pursue high ratings from other programming made the
press conference and other news-gathering procedures
too slow and dull for modern audiences. The presidency
had to turn itself into an arm of show-business to
retain its allure.

[...] he White House should stop being a prop in a
constantly running movie production of the celebrity
presidency. The Rose Garden ceremonies, the greeting
of championship athletic teams, the filming of public
service announcements, the backdrops for reporters,
all of these are innocent enough on the surface. What
is debilitating about them is the amount of time they
drain away from the serious business of the
presidency. Apologists for the White House will say
that others do the work and the president focuses on
big questions, or as the Bush administration might put
it, is "fully engaged" with the big picture. 

The notion that the movie and television production
set that the White House has become is a place for
sustained deliberative thought is a not very good
joke. Presidents now move from one camera set-up to
another in the equivalent of the headquarters of a
twenty-four hours news channel. Literally every move
that a president makes before the cameras is scripted
and planned with all the precision of a Hollywood
sound stage from the books they carry to the
helicopter, the obligatory pause and wave at the top
of the stairs, to the slogans that appear behind them
on television.

Presidents present all this electronic artifice as
though it were an essential part of being a successful
chief executive. If a president wins reelection or
enjoys wide popularity, then that is offered as
justification for media manipulation and deft staging
of the incumbent's public image. That all of this
wizardry comes out of the president's limited stock of
time to deal with crucial issues is usually put aside
as the carping of partisan critics.

An important collaborator in this process of turning
the presidency into an arm of show business is the
media. As the newspaper industry at the turn of the
twentieth century has morphed into the media
conglomerates of the beginning of the twenty-first,
the press has entered into co-dependency with the
presidency. Presidents draw viewers when properly
presented, and the media find the White House and its
staged moments irresistible subjects for coverage (at
least until the next sensational California homicide
happens). 

Reporters no longer cover the White House in the sense
of pursuing news. They are there instead as props in
the domestic drama that fills in the dead hours on
cable television until something real happens. Both
sides know how to play their parts. The reporters ask
seemingly tough questions which the White House press
secretary then declines to address. The two sides wait
until the cameras turn off and then move to the next
phase of the pre-determined coverage. [...] 

<http://hnn.us/articles/1480.html>





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