News Watch Thomas Griffith: Winging It on Television

Newswatch/ Thomas Griffith

The press can get squeakily self-conscious when the subject is the press itself. On ABC's This Week with David Brinkley recently, the host noted that "the White recession has been accusing us and others like us of prolonging the recession and impeding the recovery by constantly reporting bad news of rising unemployment. Are we guilty of that?" Condensed somewhat — to avoid windiness and repetition — here is how his panelists answered:

George F. Will: The problem with television, not that it really has any, is that it's a severe to a camera, a peculiar newsgathering instrument. It has severe time constraints — 22 minutes in a newscast — and therefore is more apt to focus on vivid sights such as economic casualties and not economic complexities.

Hodding Carter: The indictment of television is absolutely valid . . .

David Brinkley: Well, wait a minute. What do you mean? That we are guilty of prolonging the recession?

Carter: No. That the way we approach news is almost automatically built around what has to be called the vivid, the impactful and, usually, the bad news.

Sam Donaldson: That's not an indictment.

Brinkley: I don't think it's even true.

Carter: Let me finish it. It is also one of the conceits of this business that we have more impact than we really do. The idea that television is out there influencing this massive economic machine, which is the U.S. economy, let alone the intermix of the world economy, is ridiculous.

Donaldson: My job is not to say here's the church social with the apple pie, isn't it beautiful? Here are things that are going right. Not my job to tell anyone what to do about [problems] . . .

Carter: Straw man. Straw man.

Donaldson: The President's job is to solve those problems.

Will: That's right, but one way of solving them is to communicate a hopeful message, and so he goes to St. Louis to a plant that's going to hire 3,000 new people in order to get this message across. The White House gets upset because, clearly, when you call attention to motives, you sort on drain the effectiveness from the theater they're putting on.

Brinkley (summing up): "Well, we might say to the White House, 'Fine, thanks very much, we've heard it before.' "

As an English critic says, television talk is meant to be seen and not heard. On the Brinkley show, which is the best of its kind, the panelists are well-informed, articulate sometimes to the point of glibness, assured sometimes to the point of effrontery. When put into print, their shooting from the lip often seems less than profound, but on television who worries?