Page 128 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

Chapter 5
Bites and blips: chunk news, savvy talk
and the bifurcation of American politics
Todd Gitlin

In the pilot film for ABC’s 1987 TV series Max Headroom, an
investigative reporter discovers that an advertiser is compressing TV
commercials into almost instantaneous ‘blipverts’, units so high-
powered they can cause some viewers to explode. American television
has been for some time compressing politics into chunks, ten-second
‘bites’ and images that seem to freeze into icons as they repeat across
millions of screens and newspapers. The politics of the American 1980s
is saturated with these memorably memorialized moments. As a
symbolic display, the decade begins with the image of the blindfolded
hostages in Teheran, emblems of American victimization and
helplessness, fairly begging to be released by (to take up succeeding
images) Ronald Reagan at the Korean demilitarized zone, wearing a
flak jacket, holding field-glasses, keeping an eye on the North Korean
communists; or in a Normandy bunker, simulating the wartime
performance he had spared himself during the actual Second World
War. The decade proceeds with the image of the American medical
student kissing American soil after troops have evacuated him from
Grenada. The aura of invulnerability bears traces of Star Wars cartoon
simulations, depicting hypothetical streaks cleanly knocking off Soviet
blips far off in the fastness of electronic space. Not a moment too soon,
the fading years of the 1980s are marked by the image of Oliver North
saluting and Mikhail Gorbachev pressing the flesh of Washington
crowds.
But the sense of history as a collage reaches some sort of fever pitch
in the 1988 presidential election campaign. There it is hard to recall
anything but blips and bites—George Bush conspicuously reciting the
Pledge of Allegiance; Bush in a paid thirty-second spot touring what is
supposed to be the garbage of Boston Harbor (leaving aside that some
of the spot was shot in Rhode Island); the menacing face of Willie