Chattering Heads: A Viewer's Campaign Diary, 1984

CHATTERING HEADS: A VIEWER'S CAMPAIGN DIARY, 1984 / Mark Crispin Miller ? ON NOVEMBER 3, 1983, Dan Rather, having introduced the CBS Evening News and himself with a semi-cordial smile, suddenly tensed up, and made the following grim announcement: Syria tonight appears to be making a major new move in Lebanon—a potentially ominous situation—with possible farreaching ramifications for U.S. forces in the area, for Israel, and for peace in the Middle East and beyond. Before we could leap from our chairs to bolt the windows shut, Rather continued: It involves violent new fighting in northern Lebanon, within the Palestine Liberation Organization. The combatants are forces loyal to Yasser Arafat, and more radical Syrian-backed rebels, who believe diplomacy should be abandoned for more armed struggle. We were then shown a typical filmed report from Lebanon, telling us, basically, that Arafat was still under siege, and was asking Syria to stop it. Even with its lively bits of battle footage, the report had to seem anticlimactic after Rather's nerve-wracking lead-in. For there was no "major new move" by Syria, whose responsibility for the PLO rebellion had been well-known for some time. Nor was there any evidence to support Rather's tortuous implication that Syria was somehow going to get those "U.S. forces in the area," then Israel, and then the rest of us. His announcement, in fact, was little more than a series of gratuitous shockers: "ominous situation," "violent new fighting," "more radical Syrian-backed rebels," "armed struggle." With its evocation of some as-yet-unseen and spreading evil, it amounted, despite all its redundancies and polysyllables, to this simple message: "Boo!" This opening move was meant to make us jump. It was therefore a typical bit of televisual rhetoric, the sort of prefatory jolt devised to make us watch programs like "Miami Vice," or "Knight Rider"—ample girl walks down deserted street (followed jerkily by the hand-held camera), hears footsteps, looks back, screams, gets stabbed/abducted/ raped, and then the credits come. As Dan Rather's little fiction 100 · The Missouri Review demonstrates, however, the anchorman knows how to zap us far more skillfully, insinuating violence rather than depicting it. Moreover, the brutal opening act that hooks us into sitting through "Hunter" or "The ATeam" is usually related to the ensuing story, whereas the telejournalistic tease need not have much, if anything, to do with what it seems to introduce. Such disjointedness is rare on television. There is only one other kind of TV spectacle that worries us as slyly as Dan Rather does, evoking dreadful possibilities that don't pertain to what comes next, and that is the TV commercial—man wakes up in dead of night, sees wife is missing, calls her name, bolts out of bed, then finds wife crying on front stoop. Despite these hints of desertion and dementia, however, wife turns out to be shedding tears of absolute contentment, whereupon her easy hubby fetches her a cup of Taster's Choice. This rhetorical congruence between the ads and newscasts on TV reveals the way in which the network newsmen actually regard us. Whether or not they would admit it, and even if they aren't aware of it, nearly all the TV newsmen think of us, not as an audience of grown-up citizens, but as a market. Thus what directs the newsmen is not that legendary "liberal bias" condemned so often by the right, nor is it any such cabal of corporate higher-ups as is frequently invoked by vulgar Marxists. Rather, the TV newsman does the bidding of those higher-ups entirely on his own and without knowing it, simply by thinking as they think; that is, by regarding us as a potential mass of buyers, inattentive, fickle and dim-witted, and who therefore need to be expertly stroked or startled or cajoled, anything to keep the ratings high. Given this deep commercial orientation, the news machine's exceptionalist ideology, its reported claims to be devoted to "the public interest" and therefore better than "the rest of television," are unjustified. It is the function of the news, just as it is the function of...