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BITES AND BLIPS 121

dependent on Washington insiders, not so tightly bound to the source-
cultivating and glad-handing that guide reportage in Washington. And it
was a morning show that discovered that the Bush and Dukakis
campaigns had hired the same Hollywood lighting professionals to
illuminate their rallies. (Possibly the Dukakis handlers had learned from
Walter Mondale’s blunder in turning a 1984 debate lighting decision
over to Reagan’s more skilled people, leaving Mondale showing rings
under his eyes.) 1
As befit the new and sometimes dizzying self-consciousness,
reporters sometimes displayed, even in public, a certain awareness that
they were players in a game not of their own scripting; that they could be
had, and were actively being had, by savvy handlers; and that they were
tired of being had. The problem first acquired currency with a tale told
about a 1984 campaign piece broadcast by the CBS correspondent
2
Lesley Stahl. Here is Stahl’s own version of the story, as she told it on
election night on ABC’s Viewpoint:

This was a five-minute piece on the evening news…at the end of
President Reagan’s ‘84 campaign, and the point of the piece was
to really criticize him for—I didn’t use this language in the piece
—but the point was, he was trying to create amnesia over the
budget cuts. For instance… I showed him at the Handicapped
Olympics, and I said, you wouldn’t know by these pictures that
this man tried to cut the budget for the handicapped. And the
piece went on and on like that. It was very tough, and I was very
nervous about going back to the White House the next day, Sam
[she is talking to fellow panelist and prime competitor Sam
Donaldson of ABC], because I thought they’d never return my
phone calls and they’d keep returning yours. [Thus does
competition within the journalistic pack cultivate subservience.—
T.G.] But my phone rang, and it was a White House official
[according to a good source, this was Richard Darman, now
President Bush’s director of the Office of Management and
Budget—T.G.], and he said, ‘Great piece, Lesley.’ And I said,
‘Come on, that was a tough—what do you mean, “great piece”?’
And he said, ‘We loved it, we loved it, we loved it. Thank you
very much. It was a five-minute commercial, you know, unpaid
commercial for our campaign.’ I said, ‘Didn’t you hear what I
said? I was tough!’ And he said, ‘Nobody heard what you said.
They just saw the five minutes of beautiful pictures of Ronald
Reagan. They saw the balloons, they saw the flags, they saw the