Page 136 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

BITES AND BLIPS 125

follow narrative while others, disproportionately the young, pay more
attention to distinct, out-of-context images. 8
What professional handlers and TV journalists alike do is find images
which condense their ‘little playlets’—images which satisfy both lovers
of story and lovers of image. Then blip-centered television floods the
audience with images that compress and evoke an entire narrative. The
American 1980s begin with one of these: the blindfolded American
featured in the logo that identified the first late-night news program in
the history of American television, the long-running melodrama called
America Held Hostage, sixty-three weeks of it during 1979–81, running
on ABC at 11.30 p.m. five nights a week, propounding an image of
America as ‘pitiful helpless giant’ (in Nixon’s phrase). Those were the
months when Walter Cronkite signed off at CBS night after night by
ticking off ‘the umpty-umpth day of captivity for the American hostages
in Iran’. In this ceremony of innocence violated, the moment arose to
efface the national brooding over Vietnam. Now it could be seen that
the Vietnam trauma had eclipsed the larger truth: it was the anti-
Americans who were ugly. The blindfolded American, disfigured by
anti-Americans, was the contemporary equivalent of the paleface
captive of redskins, that American victim-hero whose tradition runs
9
back to the seventeenth century. The image cried out for a man to ride
out of the sagebrush on a white horse into the White House. The script
for the Teheran playlet was not written by the Reagan handlers
(although it is possible that they promised weapons to Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards in exchange for their keeping the hostages until
election day), but they certainly knew how it would end.
We know how adept Reagan was at performing his playlets— he’d
10
been doing them all his life. For eight years we heard endlessly about
the mysterious personal qualities of the Great Communicator-in-Chief,
from reporters rushing about bearing spray-cans of Teflon and
marveling at his peculiar capacity to resist criticism. Reporters routinely
declared that Reagan was more popular than the polls themselves
revealed. But the mighty Wurlitzer of the media was not devised
11
either by or for Reagan. It was primed for any of a number of possible
figures who knew how to play upon it. The adaptability of the apparatus
is exhibited by the media success of even as maladroit a figure as
George Bush during the 1988 election. Having declared that Bush’s
central problem was to lick the wimp image (Newsweek devoted its 19
October 1987 cover story to what it headlined ‘Fighting the “Wimp
Factor”’), the media permitted him to impress them that, when he
started talking tough, he had turned out ‘stronger than expected’. In