Category Archives: Reviews

Writing History Without the Soundtrack

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Double DownTwo recent and widely reviewed political books are clear reminders of just how frail our civil life has become. Double Down by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (Penguin, 2013) and This Town by Mark Leibovich (Penguin, 2013) offer riveting but off-putting accounts of the twin challenges of winning national elections and taking on the responsibilities of governing. Leibovich focuses on the unique customs of high level politicos who move back and forth between K Street offices and various high-level federal jobs. Halperin and Heilemann have provided a re-election sequel to their account of the 2008 campaign, Game Change. Reviewers have rightly praised both books for their thorough research and breezy readability. These writers have listened to their sources, and are good at weaving interviews into compelling stories. In both cases it’s clear that they have done about as much as a reporter can do using “background” rules (sources remain mostly unidentified) to flesh out their narratives. Those who talked wanted to be a part of the record, even though the dominant impression is of political elites infatuated with the intricacies of political strategy. Members of the Washington pundit class are nothing if not addicted game-players.

Even so, anyone using these books as snapshots of our recent history is bound to be struck by how much our national affairs journalism continues to be dominated by narratives that tell rather than show. As a campaign history, Double Down is especially notable for how little space is given to what Barack Obama and Mitt Romney actually said in the sprawling campaign of 2012. Direct quotes come infrequently, and then as just a few select words from much longer speeches. Statements by the candidates—even ones billed as “major” policy addresses—are either ignored or used to illustrate an awkward gaffe. These books dwell on moments when the candidates made comments that violated some strategic goal the campaign team had fashioned for a given day.

So we learn that the GOP challenger was prepared to give “a major economic address” in Detroit, partly to address accusations that had dogged him that he didn’t care about the auto industry. But the reporting in Double Down never really gets to the speech. For this and many other similar events it is preoccupied with backstories about botched planning and advance work. The authors duly note that the setting in a mostly empty stadium was an advance-planner’s nightmare. In addition, Romney was apparently tone-deaf to what his words would mean:

The drafting of the speech had been a replay of CPAC, only worse. The version Romney saw that morning was such a mess, it lacked any mention of the auto  industry. . . .With no time for a run-through, he took the stage and opened  with an ab-lib. “This feels good, being back in Michigan,” he said. “I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” (e-location, 4510)

The deeper implication of this example—that Romney had nothing to offer but some ill-considered pandering to the crowd—contributes to a book that is less than a history than one long paraphrase. We get to hear nothing more of this and many other addresses. The equivalent in non-fiction film would be an account where the narrator never pauses long enough to actually hear what the subjects of the film are actually saying.

This kind of “strategy” writing emphasizes the maneuvers and counter-maneuvers of political agents as they jockey for favorable position within a power structure. Tactical mastery is suggested in reporting about favorable poll numbers for a candidate or cause, or a perfect one-liner as a pivot out of a tight spot, or a media “buy” that leaves another candidate without time to reach tv viewers firmly locked to their sofas. A given moment has “winners” who press their advantages on “losers”—usually by having more money, better access, or news of a favorable poll . The lesser candidate is relegated to a dead corner on the game board.

Revealingly, in their own 1992 study, Spiral of Cynicism, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Jamieson and Joseph Cappela confirmed that about 67% of all political broadcast and print stories tilted toward strategy reporting. Stories about the strategic intentions of a candidate are easier to write than accounts explaining what a candidate thinks. Though lamented by journalism think tanks and critics, no one believes this preference for strategy over policy has changed much in the intervening years.

I’d like to be able to say that it was different when Theodore White was writing his influential campaign volumes in the 1960s. White’s Making of the President series is a benchmark for the kinds of exhaustive campaign recapitulations that now regularly show up in bookstores a few months after an election. But he was also immersed in long back-story chronologies, though he gave the campaign process a greater sense of complexity. The irony is that this kind of reporting tends to turn our leaders into relatively minor players in sprawling multicharacter dramas of palace intrigue. Even Shakespeare sensed the appeal in making politics less about ideas than the daily struggles of the powerful. His plays are filled with kings and courtiers struggling to master the machinery of their own re-invention.

All of this suggests and perhaps contributes to the widespread suspicion that public discourse is easily dismissed. But in response to the view that “rhetoric” deserves the “mere” that is frequently placed in front of it, there is an easy retort: What would we substitute in its place? If we wish to enrich our understanding of the process, how can it possibly help to render mute the principals who seek to lead? Even if they come heavily discounted by their receivers, their words truly matter.

Gary C. Woodward

Review of Radio Utopia by Matthew C. Ehrlich

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Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest, by Matthew C. Ehrlich (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011) ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03611-8 (hardcover), for the Journal of Mass Communication and Society.

 

Matthew Ehrlich’s excellent study of radio after World War II is a reminder of the old joke partisans of the medium would tell their colleagues in television.  The two forms have some things in common, goes the punch line, “but radio’s pictures are better.”  And never more so than in the period between 1946 and 1951: the narrow band of years when radio was the beneficiary of networks flush with cash, and motivated to support a nation battered by years of war.  Ehrlich’s book (the winner of AEJMC’s Tankard Book Award in 2012) is a meticulously researched history that focuses on mostly familiar names that we now associate with the early years of broadcast journalism: William Paley, Edward R. Murrow, Robert Lewis Shayon, Fred Friendly and others.  The stories of more obscure figures are told as well, among them, accounts of work by Ruth Ashton, Lou Hazam, and Morton Wishengrad.  At CBS Ashton broke through network resistance against women in substantive positions to produce a program called “The Sunny Side of the Atom.”  Hazam produced a series of NBC programs on the prosaic aspects of what it means to be “home.”   And Wishengrad had the perilous assignment of writing a series of three programs about “communism” that were endlessly second-guessed down to just one.  Since these were perilous times for left-wingers in broadcasting and the arts, the conclusion that Wishengrad’s effort was a mostly unhappy experience is perhaps the greatest understatement in the book.

If this detailed study offers a corrective to other narratives about this early period, it’s perhaps by more centrally placing Norman Corwin at the vanguard of early documentary production.  Most of us think of Corwin as a pioneer in broadcast drama.  But his early days at CBS were mostly consumed in the thrall of building a new world order that would bury fascism and reclaim the promises and social covenant of the New Deal.  The documentary series that were undertaken especially at CBS were ambitious, including Corwin’s One World Flight, which dared to incorporate taboo recorded sound from far-flung corners of the world.  The series captured moments from a generously-funded tour, and was intended to take the strangeness out of contrasting cultures.  Corwin interviewed miners, artists, scientists and ordinary people on the street.  A common theme in all of them was a distaste for fascism and colonialism.  But it was the grinding poverty of India and the Far East that posed the greatest challenge to repackage with any kind of hope.   As with Shayon’s later The Eagle’s Brood—a series focused on the rising fear of juvenile crime—the programs were earnest and melioristic; Ehrlich’s over-arching thesis emphasizes the desire of producers and program-makers to face post-war problems with optimism, and with an eye on searching for hopeful governmental or organizational solutions.

Of course, against this modest level of broadcast progressivism was an increasing American susceptibility to fantasies of internal subversion.  No one writing a history of this period could ignore it.  And Ehrlich generally gives Counterattack and Red Channels their due, perhaps in more neutral language than they deserve.  He ably recounts the spread of the poison of Red Channels from advertising agencies to the networks, and notes that a loyalty oath required of CBS employees soon followed.  Shayon is quoted to the effect that the venerable Murrow didn’t come to his defense, or speak to him again after he was fired because of blacklisting.  Never very happy with his management duties, Murrow apparently accepted the necessity of the oath to stave off the loss of even more talent.

One surprise of this study is how many of these programs in the late 1940s were fully scripted.  Radio documentaries were more akin to docudramas, even when the participants in the discussion where subject matter experts who were surely capable of extemporizing on their specialties.  So a 1946 program about the atomic bomb, Operation Crossroads, included notables like Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglass, and Albert Einstein.  But Ehrlich notes that the “cast engaged in scripted dialogue with a group of ordinary citizens specially assembled for the program.”  The pattern continued later in CBS is There!, and still later in the long running Here it Now.  If we wonder today why electronic news remains centered on the convenience of reporters and anchors, this kind of safe predictability confirms a pattern nearly as old as the medium.

In the final chapter Ehrlich broadly assesses and summarizing reporting styles and other norms of the period.  It’s a brief chapter, and mostly positive about the commercial networks’ efforts in “democratic empowerment.”  The F.C.C.s 1946 “Blue Book” on the public service obligations of broadcasters looms large here as a motivating “stick.”  But it would have been interesting to venture into an admittedly more speculative discussion about how journalistic styles have changed, and how documentary as an electronic form has weathered the years.  In some ways it seems as if the casting and scripting of programs common to the 1940s seems to have become the method of “reality programs” today.  Except, of course, those programs document nothing so much as our narcissistic times.

Against the journalistic hunger for stretching the minds of listeners especially at CBS were the guiding hands of William Paley and Frank Stanton.  Stanton was the researcher and inventor (along with Paul Lazerfeld) of an early precursor to dial-group/audience analyzer technology widely used today.  He established the research ethos at CBS, but Paley gave it its strategic function.  “Sustaining” and unprofitable programs were fine to a point.  But he made it clear that CBS would cede no ground in the search for audiences to its richer entertainment rival, NBC.   So the legendary struggle between news and entertainment that we now associate with Paley and the team of Murrow-Friendly was actually set as early as 1948, when the CBS Chairman cautioned Corwin that news needed to be able to compete.  As Ehrlich notes, this era of experimentation with radio as a window onto our civil life would not last long.  Network rivalries were entering a new phase that would include the potentially lucrative addition of television.  The older medium that gave us images in our imagination would soon have to compete with a new one that required more from production staffs and arguably less from its audiences.

 

Gary C. Woodward

The College of New Jersey