Page 140 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

BITES AND BLIPS 129

racist slogans to white southern voters in the belief that northern voters
would not notice. Above all else, though, the powers of the new media
created a pressure toward professional management. Intermittently,
‘negative campaigning’ sought out the media of the moment.
Professionally concocted newsreels, in which actors protrayed irate
citizens, played an important part in the defeat of the socialist Upton
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Sinclair’s 1934 ‘End Poverty in California’ campaign for governor. A
documentary newsreel spliced together at the last minute to counter the
Republican Thomas Dewey probably helped the Democrat Harry
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S.Truman squeak through in 1948.
These precursors are important—television is not the original sin. But
only with television and the proliferation of primary campaigns did media
management become central and routine to political campaigns. What
had been intermittent became routine. In 1952, Dwight D.Eisenhower—
whose campaign was the first to buy TV spots—was at first reluctant to
advertise. In 1956, the Democrat Adlai E.Stevenson summoned his
television consultant one night during the Democratic Convention—to
ask him to fix his receiver. After 1960, when John F.Kennedy was
23
credited with having defeated a sweating, five-o’clock-shadowed
Richard Nixon in televised debate, the handwriting was on the screen. It
didn’t matter whether the televised debate had been decisive in
Kennedy’s victory—in fact, Kennedy’s margin was so narrow that any
one of a number of factors was arguably decisive. What mattered was
that the management of television was one factor that candidates
believed they could control. The time of the professional media
consultant had arrived. By the time his hour came round again in 1968,
the new Nixon had learned to use—and submit to—professional image
managers. Nixon was the first president to move advertising and public
relations personnel into his high command. And not just for the
campaign. The president in office could use the same skills he used for
nomination and election. Nixon’s right-hand men, Bob Haldeman and
John Ehrlichman, the public relations professionals with their enemies
lists and provocateur tactics, were the founding fathers of what Sidney
Blumenthal later called ‘the permanent campaign’— a combination of
polling, image-making and popularity-building strategy which Reagan’s
handlers developed to the highest of low arts. 24
The pattern seems set for the 1980s: metacoverage for the
cognoscenti; concocted pageantry for the hoi polloi. But pageantry only
mobilizes the population under two conditions—they must believe there
is something at stake, and they must be drawn into some form of
participation. As the spectacle becomes more scripted and routine—the