|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
politics
Un-Conventional Ideas
by Roone Arledge
Roone Arledge is chairman of ABC News. He served as president
of ABC News from 1977-1997, and was president of ABC Sports from 1968-1986.
Some of the innovative programming he introduced includes Nightline,
20/20, PrimeTime Live, This Week, ABC's Wide World
of Sports, and ABC's Monday Night Football. Arledge has won thirty-six
Emmy Awards, four George Foster Peabody Awards, and is a member of the Academy
of Television Arts and Science Hall of Fame.
Every
once in a while as the commentators talk about who will win the primaries and
how much money George W. has raised, the word Convention is heard. All possible
contestants see themselves standing before a huge television audience explaining
the new vision that should animate the country. All convention cities see a week
of television crews roaming the streets and making them even more famous. And
the major networks stare at an anachronism that by the year 2000 will have little
point, few viewers, and no hope of engaging the nation.
Unless things change, both parties will once again go through a four-day ritual invented before the telephone or radio or the jet plane, making believe that the delegates will choose a candidate, but actually staging the entire process for what they think is the benefit of the cameras. There is less and less a pretense that this is serious business and more and more attention paid to how it will play. The result is that the nation that used to watch in 1980 (better than 50 percent of the television audience tuned in to the conventions) hardly cared in 1996 (all three commercial networks combined barely reached 25 percent of the audience) and might not watch at all in the year 2000.
We should all be concerned about this lack of interest. I come to the discussion as a citizen concerned with politics, as a news executive, and as a journalist with a long involvement in how the conventions are seen and I know there is a better way to do it.
Because the primary process, not the conventions, now chooses the candidates and eliminates debate over issues, the biggest fights at the conventions are about who gets on television. I remember l984 in San Francisco when the Democratic party tied itself in knots — not about a legislative agenda or a platform discussion but about when Jesse Jackson would get on the air and whether Jimmy Carter would be allowed to speak at all. Prime time, not principle, was the issue.
We
have had every kind of staged, feel-good event to fill up the four nights that
the parties have to devote to each convention. The first thing they want is
“harmony.” The last thing they want is an honest political argument. And some
believe the reason it takes four days is so that the host cities can recoup
in tourist dollars and air time the money they spend on luring the conventions.
Right now, the parties will be lucky to get an hour a night on the major networks. It might be less. And I’m talking about broadcasting, not covering in the journalistic sense, because mostly we interview people while the parties complain that we do not follow what is on the platform or what is in their canned party films.
The conventions will undoubtedly be covered, as we used to say, “gavel to gavel” by the cable twenty-four-hour news services, but the number of viewers they reach is minuscule compared to what the networks would.
There have been some powerful moments at conventions we can remember. In 1980, Ronald Reagan beat back the attempt to make Gerald Ford both his vice presidential candidate and, if they won, a sort of co-president. Things were so carefully managed and quiet when George Bush was nominated in 1988, however, that the one unexpected moment, when he chose Dan Quayle to be his vice presidential candidate (significantly, on the plane coming to the convention, not at the convention itself) led 5,000 reporters with nothing to do to make fools of themselves, the process and, perhaps unfairly, the candidate. Generally speaking though, there is practically a guarantee that there will be no news at a modern convention.
There has to be a better way to go about this. Here’s an idea:
ABC News proposes that if the parties will take two nights to discuss only serious issues with serious political people and not actors (because, with all due respect for a brave and inspiring man, Christopher Reeve had nothing to do with the real business that should have been going on at the Democratic convention in 1996) then we, in turn, will use at least two hours of prime time on those nights for coverage.
In those two-hour minimum blocks we will set the scene for our viewers and get out of the way. We will not interview people during speeches, nor will we analyze unless news occurs. Within the time frame, we will try to carry speeches to their conclusion.
If the parties are serious and the speeches have significance, Americans who have massively deserted viewing may return. If they return, they might even vote in bigger numbers. If the parties are serious, we also propose to fight to get the conventions out of the ratings system. (The total viewership for all three networks combined for all the hours of either the last Democratic or Republican convention did not add up to one average episode of ER.) The idea that we should be fighting over the network distribution of almost no audience is absurd. The conventions should be an exercise in democracy, not a sitcom, and they should not be subject to the same measurement and comparison.
This is not an easy proposal for a news organization to make, but something has to be done to see if conventions can work better and ultimately increase public interest in campaigns and elections.
That leads to a second proposal. The parties and others have proposed that the networks should provide one- and two-minute free commercials to the candidates in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
Our experience with State of the Union rebuttals and the general prevalence of attack ads and irrelevant issues leads us to believe that free ads would not differ in content from the ones we see now.
We ought to do something more substantial. ABC News offers to turn over one full hour, free, to the candidates for a total, open debate, one-on-one, with no moderator except to introduce them. This is instead of the current system of reporters playing “Gotcha!” but it can be in addition to the current debate formats.
There will be no incumbent in the next presidential election. Neither side can argue the advantage of office. We will make such a debate — a real debate — available to any broadcaster that wishes to carry it.
I hope the candidates will seriously consider the opportunity to test each other, to see their intellects in action, to get away from the pre-packaged answers and the spin control that go into “debates” as we have known them. If it was good enough for Lincoln and Douglas, it ought to be good enough for us.
Our national interest in politics is dangerously low. These things may not raise it. But television must help where it can. Because television and politics are so intertwined, the politicians and their handlers have begun to think of themselves as producers of commercials and mini-dramas. But they are not succeeding. As we re-think television, we ought to re-think the way politics gets on television. We ought to give seriousness a chance.
