Page 131 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

120 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

phrases. Dukakis handlers even made a commercial about Bush
handlers wringing their hands about how to handle Dan Quayle, a
commercial that went over far better with hip connoisseurs than with the
unhip rest of the audience who had trouble tracing the commercial to
Dukakis. What I will call campaign metacoverage, coverage of the
coverage, partakes of the postmodern fascination with surfaces and the
machinery that cranks them out, a fascination indistinguishable from
surrender— as if once we understand that all images are concocted, we
are enlightened. (This is the famous Brechtian ‘alienation effect’ but
with a difference: Brecht thought that actors, by standing outside and
‘presenting’ their characters, could lay bare social relations and show
that life could be changed; paradoxically, campaign metacoverage, by
laying bare the campaign’s tactics and inside doings, demonstrates only
that the campaign is a juggernaut that cannot be diverted.) Thus, voice-
overs explained knowingly that the candidate was going to a flag
factory, driving a tank, etc., in order to score public relations points.
Here, for example, is ABC correspondent Brit Hume narrating the
appearance of George Bush at a flag factory on 20 September 1988:
‘Bush aides deny he came here to wrap himself in the flag, but if that
wasn’t the point of this visit, what was it?’
In the same vein was the new post-debate ritual: the networks
featuring campaign consultants (‘spin doctors’), on camera, telling
reporters why their respective candidates had done splendidly, while
network correspondents affected an arch superiority and print reporters
insisted that the spin doctors couldn’t spin them. Meanwhile,
presumably unswayable pundits rattled on about how the candidates
performed, whether they had given good sound bite —issuing reviews,
in other words, along with behind-the-scenes assessments of the
handlers’ skill in setting expectations for the performance, so that, for
example, if Dan Quayle succeeded in speaking whole sentences he was
to be decreed a success in ‘doing what he set out to do’.
These rituals exhibited the insouciant side of insouciant sub-servience
—reporters dancing attendance at the campaign ball while insisting that
they were actually following their own beat. Evaluating the candidates’
claims and records was considered highbrow and boring—and
potentially worse. For to probe too much or too far into issues, to show
too much initiative in stating the public problems, would be seen by the
news business as hubris —a violation of their unwritten agreement to
let the candidates set the public agenda. Curiously, the morning shows,
despite their razzmatazz, may have dwelt on issues more than the
nightly news— largely because the morning interviewers were not so