Reagan's TV Troubles

By Thomas Griffith

Perhaps because Ronald Reagan doesn't read all that much, he cares more about what television shows than what print says. He and television both know that facts are heavy, arguments confusing, charts boring; to grab the biggest audience, give your story the human touch. This is "for-example" journalism and politics, which frequently mislead.

Reagan's homely anecdotes often prove to be factually wrong. TV commonly focuses its cameras on the glibbest or noisiest "man (or woman) in the street" to typify instant public reaction. This mutual use offer-example is what made Reagan's outburst so heartfelt: "Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash some place has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?" In turn, checking the accuracy of every anecdote the President uses to make a point may seem a picayune exercise for the press, but it is unavoidable when argument by anecdote replaces real discussion.

Twice of late the State Department has been embarrassed by its own for-example pleading. Secretary of State Al Haig waved a photo spread from the French Figaro of the "most atrocious genocidal actions" in Nicaragua, which proved to be an old picture of something else. State then proudly produced a live Nicaraguan guerrilla captured in El Salvador who proved to be a slick young Marxist recanting all he had been expected to say. Still, the difficulty the Administration has in making, or selling, its case was evidenced in an ambitious prime-time CBS News report on Central America. CBS sent Mike Wallace to Nicaragua, Ed Rabel to Guatemala, and Bill Moyers to El Salvador.

It was a well-produced look at three melancholy places. But as in most documentaries, vivid pictures had to be conscientiously "balanced" by words that were inevitably less vivid. In El Salvador viewers saw familiar shootups and corpses in government territory; with the guerrillas, as Moyers said, "you see what you are shown." At the end of 90 minutes, Moyers owlishly summed up in documentary neutralese where "we Americans are": "It is tricky now to tiptoe across a tightrope carrying the past on one shoulder and fear of our enemies on the other." Viewers, after being subjected to so many pathetic widows, arrogant generals, bombed buses and armed children, might have drawn a much simpler, less judicious conclusion: Why get more deeply involved in such a morass?

At one point, Dan Rather asked Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's starchy Ambassador to the U.N., to judge press coverage of Central America ("Give me both barrels, don't hold back"). Kirkpatrick: "I think CBS has been particularly bad, if I may say so." The New York Times and Washington Post also got low marks from Kirkpatrick. All three, she said, "suffer from the Viet Nam syndrome." That phrase is also used by Reagan, apparently to describe a press that doesn't believe its Government and "challenges what we're doing." The President told TV Guide: "Had that been done in World War II, in behalf of the enemy that was killing American military men, I think there would have been a revolution in America."

In January, when CBS last devoted so much time to a documentary, the subject was Viet Nam. Ill-prepared for Mike Wallace's searching questioning, General William C. Westmoreland came off badly. In a speech two weeks ago, the general said that in any future war the news would have to be controlled to hold public support: "Viet Nam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. Television is an instrument which can paralyze this country."

Would Westmoreland want the news "controlled" at an earlier stage in the process, when military steps or the threat of them might deter a war but might also lead to one? However much the Administration wanted to make El Salvador a testing ground, pollsters report the American public decidedly opposed to military involvement. At another place and another time, with the national interest more clearly at risk, could an Administration in the age of television act boldly? Democracy hasn't found the answer to that question yet.

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