Television's Necessary Neuters

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

As the event recedes, the impact of television diplomacy in the Middle East seems less something to brag on --or to worry about. In fact, the coverage demonstrated how neuter television journalists had to be in a situation where two foreign leaders were playing so adroitly to the American public on all three networks.

The power of television's eye persists: to the watcher, the visible thawing of the dour-looking Begin and the expansiveness of Sadat conveyed a compatibility that no communique could have made as credible. But consider the conduct of the three famous anchor people: each got an "exclusive" interview; whatever unseemly scrambling this required took place offscreen. On-camera, addressed chummily as Walter, John and Barbara, they deferentially answered back "Mr. President" or "Mr. Prime Minister," behaved like diplomats and asked soft questions, as if afraid their very questions might queer the peace. Confined to friction-free language, they repeatedly used words like historic and momentous; their principal editorial counsel was that viewers should judge the success of the meeting by what Sadat would get in return for his visit--though Sadat seems to have gone happily home without any such present.

Television's antiseptic neuterdom is probably as it should be, but it ought to be kept in mind when people worry about the "power" of the TV news stars. To be sure, on lesser occasions they can be bolder. On that same weekend Mike Wallace, who is skilled at off-balance questions that evoke unexpected answers, was asking a CIA witness: "You're pretty arrogant, aren't you?" Barbara Walters once felt entitled to ask the President-elect on-camera if he and Rosalynn would share a White House double bed (Carter, being a populist, didn't say it was none of her business, or the public's).

John Chancellor is good at speaking the friction-free language he calls anchormanese. But he's looking forward to switching roles after seven highly visible, highly paid years in a job that mostly requires him to set a scene briefly before switching to a correspondent--a snippety, jigsaw process he considers "challenging but not rewarding." He wants to be a commentator. Last summer, with the approach of Eric Sevareid's retirement, CBS News President Dick Salant talked to Chancellor about the job. Chancellor was intrigued but decided to stay with NBC, and in his new ten-year contract has the assurance of shortly becoming a commentator. As for CBS, unable to get either Chancellor or Bill Moyers, Salant decided not to fill the 2 1/2-minute Sevareid spot: "After all, it's 10% of our news hole."

How much freer will Chancellor be to speak his piece as commentator? That too is something of a neuter craft. Even as gifted a wordsmith and observer as Sevareid could, on days when his brow was furrowed but his mind only half engaged, sound merely sententious. As the CBS News code defines the job, the analyst is "to help the listener to understand, to weigh and to judge, but not to do the judging for him . . . the audience should be left with no impression as to which side the analyst himself actually favors."

In other branches of journalism, such an idea most resembles life at the Associated Press, where, in the words of General Manager Keith Fuller, "neutrality is our bag." The A.P. constantly scrubs its language; lately, for example, it has instructed its reporters that one should say a terrorist group claimed "responsibility" for a bombing, instead of "credit" for it, "leaving it to others to judge whether it is an act to be 'credited' or not." In such tamped-down language, controversial becomes almost the strongest pejorative that can be hung on someone--and practically impossible to shake (Andrew Young, "controversial" in his first days as Ambassador to the United Nations, seems to be one of the few ever to have shed the label).

Chancellor, when he becomes a commentator, aspires to be outspoken--to present a brief as a lawyer would and end "by making a good point." He recalls the bolder broadcasts of Elmer Davis and Edward R. Murrow, and wonders why radio seems to permit freer comment than television. But were the old ones really bolder? Salant doubts it. Murrow, he says, insisted on a fairness and objectivity clause in his contract; he departed only once from this self-imposed standard, when he persuaded CBS's top brass to let him make his famous televised attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Whether a wider public appreciates such nuances of neutrality, or considers neuter journalism to be cautious, timid or dull, is harder to judge. It's not easy to be mutedly sensible in a medium so given to the brassy certainties of aging let-it-all-hang-out types, partisan politicians, sarcastic academic panelists and gabby talk-show hosts.

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