Reagan’s Reelection: How the Media Became All the President’s Men

Excluding Ronald Reagan, the most influential and intriguing political figure of 1984 was a man who probably thinks of himself as nonpolitical. Like many Americans, he undoubtedly finds most politics boring.

I am thinking of Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, the brilliant innovator who created so many of the visual formats now familiar to us as a nation of television watchers. If you really want to understand the significance of the 1984 campaign, you must look beyond the ranks of the political professionals and focus instead on television moguls like Arledge. He and his rivals at the other major networks have the kind of power that mere politicians only dream of — an awesome capability to manipulate our minds, to choose the ‘images that will dance in our thoughts.

For better or worse, it is Arledge and the few others like him who determine the quality of our political dialogue — whether it is banal and deceptive or realistic and vigorous, whether it helps us face the truth about ourselves as a nation or helps us hide from it.

In 1984, the networks, including Arledge’s, yielded to the techniques of mass propaganda — large lies told through the calculated repetition of soothing imagery and potent symbolism. The harsh facts of contradictory realities were no match for it. In a sense, the networks lost control of their own news programs. If the politics of 1984 describes the future, then Americans are being reduced to a nation of befogged sheep, beguiled by false images and manipulated ruthlessly.

Arledge, in other words, may be dangerous for democracy, probably more dangerous than his competitors at NBC and CBS, because he is so sophisticated and original. Arledge not only understands the potential power of television; he is not afraid to use it. His choice of what to show his audience is not designed to control government or even to propagate his own ideology. As a network executive, his essential purpose is amoral: whatever entertains, whatever draws a crowd, that is what Arledge wants to put in our living rooms.

Yet, when I think about what television has done to debase our politics and what it has failed to do to invigorate our democracy, I find myself pinning my hopes for the future on Roone Arledge. Perhaps I am being too generous. It is possible that he and the other network managers are quite satisfied with the levels of political manipulation embedded in their news broadcasts and therefore have no interest in change. I hope not. If Arledge would do for national politics what he has already done for sports, especially professional football, I can imagine television actually revitalizing our political dialogue, restoring to us honest, intelligent debate over issues of substance.

As a significant cultural figure, Arledge reminds me of William Randolph Hearst, who used the power of his newspapers ruthlessly, to promote his causes and trample his enemies. Less well remembered is that Hearst was also an inventive genius, the pioneering editor who originated so many of the stylistic tricks and story lines we still see in our daily newspapers.

Arledge, like Hearst, has a power to influence our politics that can be both destructive and creative. If Arledge decides that greed and gore and cheap patriotism is where it’s at, then many millions of Americans will think so, too. Yet Arledge understands, perhaps better than anyone else, the paradox of television’s power: the use of technical artifice to create a clearer sense of what is real. That was the essence of Arledge’s brilliance in sports broadcasting. With all his high-tech gimmicks, with his instant replays and his other innovations, with Howard Cosell’s commentary, Arledge — then and now president of ABC Sports — achieved something deeper than simply making football more entertaining. By reinventing the rules of how football is covered, he actually brought the television viewer much closer to the intimate reality of the game. We get right down with the players themselves.

This is what television’s news managers must now do for politics. They have to reinvent the rules for news coverage to escape from the propaganda and bring us closer to what is real about government and politics. That requires imagination, and guts, because powerful politicians are not going to like it when TV ignores their fluff and begins defining political reality on its own. If anyone has the nerve to do it, it is Roone Arledge.