I .

THE ·FOURTH ESTA'TE. I

THE TEDIUM TWINSby Alexander Cockburn'

Tonight: are there two sides to every question? Back toyou, Robin.

(Tease)ROBERT MACNEIL (voice over): AGalilean preacher claims he is theRedeemer and says the poor areblessed. Should he be crucified?

(Titles)MACNEIL: Good evening. The Ro-man procurator in Jerusalem is try-ing to decide whether a man re-garded by many as a saint shouldbe put to death. Pontius Pilate is

Alexander Cockburn writes columns forthe Village Voice and the Wall StreetIournal.

being urged by civil libertarians tointervene in what is seen here inRome as being basically a local dis-pute. Tonight, the crucifixion de-bate. Jim?JIM LEHRER: Robin, the provincesof Judaea and Galilee have alwaysbeen trouble spots, and this year isno exception. The problem is partreligious, part political, and in manyways a mixture of both. The Jewsbelieve in one god. Discontent inthe province has been growing, withmany local businessmen complain-

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1982

ing about the tax burden. Terror-ism, particularly in Galilee, has beenon the increase. In recent months,a carpenter's son from the town ofNazareth has been attracting a largefollowing with novel doctrines andfaith healing. He recently enteredJerusalem amid popular acclaim,but influential Jewish leaders fearhis power. Here in Alexandria thesituation is seen as dangerous.Robin?MACNEIL: Recently in Jerusalem ona fact-finding mission for the Em-peror's Emergency Task Force onProvincial Disorders was QuintiliusMaximus. Mr. Maximus, how doyou see the situation?MAXIMUS: Robin, I had occasion tohear one of this preacher's sermonsa few months ago and talk withhis aides. There is no doubt in mymind that he is a threat to peaceand should be crucified.MACNEIL: Pontius Pilate shouldwash his hands of the problem?MAXIMUS: Absolutely.MACNEIL: I see. Thank you. Jim?LEHRER: Now for a view from Mr.Simon, otherwise known as Peter.He is a supporter of Christ and hasbeen standing by in a Jerusalemstudio. Robin?MACNEIL: Mr. Simon Peter, why doyou support Christ?SIMON PETER: He is the Son of Godand presages the Second Coming. IfI may, I would like to read somerelevant passages from the prophetIsaiah.MACNEIL: Thank you, but I'm afraidwe'll have to break in there. We'verun out of time. Good night, Jim.LEHRER: Good night, Robin.MACNEIL: Sleep well, Jim.LEHRER: I hope you sleep well, too,Robin.MACNEIL: I think I will. Well, goodnight again, Jim.LEHRER: Good night, Robin.MACNEIL: We'll be back again to-morrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil.Good night.

•ADMIRERS of the "MacNeill

Lehrer Report"-and thereare many of them-oftentalk about it in terms nor-

mally reserved for unpalatable butnutritious breakfast foods: unallur-

ing, perhaps, to the frivolous newsconsumer, but packed full of fiber.It is commended as the sort of newsanalysis a serious citizen, dulyweighing the pros and cons of worldhistory, would wish to masticate be-fore a thoughtful browse throughthe Federalist Papers, a chat withspouse about civic duties incumbenton them on the morrow, and finalblameless repose.

The promotional material for the"Report" has a tone of reverence ofthe sort usually employed by peo-ple reading guidebooks to each oth-er in a French cathedral: "Theweek-nightly newscast's unique mixof information, expert opinion, anddebate has foreshadowed an indus-try trend toward longer and moredetailed coverage, while at the sametime helping to reveal a growingpublic appetite, for informationaltelevision. Nearly 4.5 million view-ers watch the 'MacNeil/Lehrer Re-port' each night during the primeviewing season .... "

"A program with meat on itsbones," said the Association forContinuing Higher Education, inpresenting its 1981 LeadershipAward. "The 'MacNeil/Lehrer Re-port' goes beyond the commercialnetworks' rushed recital of news tobring us in-depth coverage of singleissues. . . . There is a concern forideas rather than video images. . . .and they accord us the unusual me-dia compliment of not telling uswhat to think, but allowing us todraw our own conclusions after we,weigh conflicting views."

And the handout concludes intriumph with some findings from a1980 Roper poll: "Three quartersof those polled said they had dis-covered pros and cons on issues onwhich they had not had opinionsbeforehand."

ROBERT MACNEIL (voice over):Should one man own another?

(Titles)MACNEIL: Good evening. The prob-lem is as old as man himself. Doproperty rights extend to the abso-lute ownership of one man by an-other? Tonight, the slavery prob-lem. Jim?

LEHRER: Robin, advocates of thecontinuing system of slavery arguethat the practice has brought unpar-alleled benefits to the economy.They fear that new regulations be-ing urged by reformers would un-dercut America's economic effective-ness abroad. Reformers, on theother hand, call for legally bindingstandards and even for a phased re-duction in the slave force to some-thing like 75 percent of its presentsize. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is inCharleston. Charlayne?HUNTER-GAULT: Robin and Jim, [have here in Charleston Mr. Ginn,head of the Cottongrowers Asso-ciation. Robin?MACNEIL: Mr. Ginn, what are thearguments for unregulated slavery?GINN: Robin, our economic datashow that attempts at regulation ofworking hours, slave quarters, andso forth would reduce productivityand indeed would be widely re-sented by the slaves themselves.MACNEIL: You mean, the slaveswould not like new regulations?They would resent them?GINN: Exactly. Any curbing of theslave trade would offer the Tsardangerous political opportunities inwestern Africa, and menace the stra-tegic slave-ship routes.LEHRER: Thank you, Mr. Ginn.Robin?MACNEIL: Thank you, Mr. Ginn andJim. The secretary of the Commit-tee for Regulatory Reform in Slav-ery is Eric Halfmeasure. Mr. Half-measure, give us the other side ofthe story.HALF MEASURE : Robin, 1 would liketo make one thing perfectly clear.Weare wholeheartedly in favor ofslavery. We just see abuses that di-minish productivity and reduce in-centives for free men and womento compete in the marketplace.Lynching, tarring and feathering,rape, lack of holidays, and that sortof thing. One recent study suggeststhat regulation could raise produc-tivity by 15 percent.MACNEIL: 1 see. Thank you, Mr.Halfmeasure. Mr. Ginn?GINN: Our studies show the oppo-site.MACNEIL: Jim?LEHRER: Charlayne?

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HUNTER-GAULT: A few critics ofslavery argue that it should be abol-ished outright. One of them is Mr.Wilberforce. Mr. Wilberforce, whyabolish slavery?WILBERFORCE: It is immoral forone man ...MACNEIL: Mr. Wilberforce, we'rerunning out of time, I'm afraid. Letme very quickly get some otherpoints of view. Mr. Ginn, you thinkslavery is good?GINN: Yes.MACNEIL: And you, Mr. Haljmea-sure, think it should be regulated.HALF MEASURE : Yes.MACNEIL: Well, l've got you to dis-agree, haven't I? (Laughter) That'sall we've got time for tonight. Goodnight, Jim.LEHRER: Good night, Robin.MACNEIL: Did you sleep well lastnight?LEHRER: [ did, thank you.MACNEIL: That's good. So did LWe'll be back again tomorrow night.l'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.

THE "MacNeil/Lehrer Re-port" started in October1975, in the aftermath ofWatergate. It was a show

dedicated to the proposition thatthere are two sides to every ques-tion, a valuable corrective in a pe-riod when the American people hadfinally decided that there were ab-solutely and definitely not two sidesto every question. Nixon was acrook who had rightly been drivenfrom office; corporations were oftenheaded by crooks who carried hotmoney around in suitcases; federalofficials were crooks who broke thelaw on the say-so of the president.

It was a dangerous moment, fora citizenry suddenly imbued withthe notion that there is not only athesis and antithesis, but also a syn-thesis, is a citizenry capable of allmanner of harm to the harmoniousmotions of the status quo.

Thus came the "MacNeil/LehrerReport," sponsored by public-tele-vision funds and by the most pow-erful corporate forces in America,in the form of Exxon, "AT&T andthe Bell System," and other upstand-ing bodies. Back to Sunday school

HARPER'S! AUGUST 1982

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went the excited viewers, to be in-structed that reality, as conveyed tothem by television, is not an excit-ing affair of crooked businessmenand lying politicians but a seriouscontinuum in which parties may dis-agree but in which all involved arestruggling manfully and disinterest-edly for the public weal.

The narcotizing, humorless prop-erties of the "MacNeil/Lehrer Re-port," familiar to anyone who hasfelt fatigue creep over him at 7:40Eastern time, are crucial to theshow. Tedium is of the essence, sincethe all-but-conscious design of theprogram is to project vacuous dith-ering ("And now, for another viewof Hitler ... ") into the mind of theviewer, until he is properly convincedthat there is not one answer to "theproblem," but two or even three,and that since two answers are nobetter than none, he might as wellnot bother with the problem at all.

The techniques employed by theshow enhance this distancing andanesthetizing. The recipe is un-varying. MacNeil and Lehrer ex-change modest gobbets of infor-mation with each other about thetopic under discussion. Then, withMacNeil crouching-rather likeKermit the Frog in old age-downto the left and peering up, a hugeface appears on the screen and dis-cussion is under way. The slightestdiscommoding exchange, some in-temperate observation on the partof the interviewee, causes MacNeil tobat the ball hastily down to Wash-ington, where Lehrer sedately sitswith his interviewee. By fits andstarts, with Jim batting back toRobin and Robin batting across toCharlayne, the program lurchesalong. The antagonists are rarelypermitted to joust with one anotherand ideally are sequestered on theirlarge screens. Sometimes, near theend of the show, the camera willreveal that these supposed antago-nists are in fact sitting chummily,shoulder to shoulder, around thesame table as Lehrer-thus indicat-ing to the viewer that, while opin-ions may differ, all are united ingeneral decency of purpose. Towardthe very end, MacNeil's true rolebecomes increasingly exposed as he

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1982

desperately tries to suppress debateand substantive argument, with vol-ley after volley of "We're nearly outof time," "Congressman, in ten sec-onds could you ... ," and the final,relieved "That's all for tonight."

It's even important that MacNeiland Lehrer say good night to eachother so politely every evening. Inthat final, sedate nocturnal exchangeeverything is finally resolved, eventhough nothing has been resolved.We can all go to bed now.

And so to bed we go. The pre-tense is that viewers, duly presentedwith both sides of the case, willspend the next segment of the eve-ning weighing the pro against thecon and coming up with the answer.It is, in fact, enormously difficult torecall anything that anyone has eversaid on a "MacNeil/Lehrer Report,"because the point has been to dem-onstrate that since everything canbe contradicted, nothing may beworth remembering. The showpraised above all others for contentderives its attraction entirely fromform: the unvarying illustration thatif one man can be found to arguethat cannibalism is bad, another canbe found to argue that it is not.

Actually, this is an overstatement."MacNeil/Lehrer" hates such vio-lent extremes, and, by careful selec-tion of the show's participants, theshow tries to make sure that theviewer will not be perturbed by anyviews overly critical of the politicaland business establishment.

ROBERT MACNEIL (voice over):Should one man eat another?

(Titles)MACNEIL: Good evening. Reportsfrom the Donner Pass indicate thatsurvivors fed upon their compan-ions. Tonight, should cannibalism beregulated? lim?LEHRER: Robin, the debate pits twodiametrically opposed sides againsteach other: the Human Meat-eatersAssociation, who favor a free mar-ket in human flesh, and their regula-tory opponents in Congress and theconsumer movement. Robin?MACNEIL: Mr. Tooth, why eat hu-man flesh?TOOTH: Robin, it is full of protein

and delicious too. Without humanmeat, our pioneers would be unableto explore the West properly. Thiswould present an inviting opportu-nity to the French, who menace ourpioneer routes from the north.MACNEIL: Thank you. Jim?LEHRER: Now for another view ofcannibalism. Bertram Brussell Sproutis leading the fight to control theeating of animal fats and meats. Mr.Sprout, would you include humanflesh in this proposed regulation?SPROUT: Most certainly, Jim. Ourstudies show that some human fleshavailable for sale to the public ismaggot-ridden, improperly cut, andoften incorrectly graded. We thinkthe public should be protected fromsuch abuses.MACNEIL: Some say it is wrong toeat human flesh at all. Mr. Prod-nose, give us this point of view.PRODNOSE: Robin, eating people iswrong. We say ...MACNEIL: I'm afraid we're out oftime. Good night, Jim, etc., etc.

TRUDGING back through the"MacNeil/Lehrer" scripts,the hardy reader will soonobserve how extraordinarily

narrow is the range of opinion can-vassed by a show dedicated to dis-passionate examination of the issuesof the day. The favored blend isusually a couple of congressmen orsenators, barking at each other fromeither side of the fence, corporatechieftains, government executives,ranking lobbyists, and the odd for-eign statesman. The mix is ludi-crously respectable, almost alwaysheavily establishment in tone. Offi-cial spokesmen of trade and interestgroups are preferred over peoplewho only have something interestingto say.

This constriction of viewpoint isparticularly conspicuous in the caseof energy, an issue dear to the"MacNeil/Lehrer Report." "Eco-nomics of Nuclear Power," for ex-ample, was screened on November25, 1980, and purported to examinewhy a large number of nuclear util-ities were teetering on the edge ofbankruptcy. Mustered to ponder theissue we had the following rich and

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varied banquet: the president of theVirginia Electric and Power Com-pany; the vice president (for nu-clear operations) of CommonwealthEdison of Chicago; a vice president(responsible for scrutinizing utilityinvestments) at Paine Webber; andthe president of the Atomic Indus-trial Forum. The viewers of "Mac-Neil/Lehrer" did not, you may cor-rectly surmise, hear much criticalopinion about nuclear power on thatparticular evening.

On May 1, 1981, the "Report"examined "the problems and pros-pects of getting even more oil outof our ground." Participants in thediscussion about oil glut includedsome independent oil drillers, and"experts" from Merrill Lynch, Phil-lips Petroleum Company, and theRand Corporation.

At least on May 1 the viewershad more than one person sayingthe same thing ("regulation is bad").On March 27 they were invited toconsider the plans of the Reaganadministration for a rebuilt navy.The inquiring citizen was offered atrip around the battleship Iowa inthe company of MacNeil, and an ex-tremely meek interview, conductedby both MacNeil and Lehrer, of theSecretary of the Navy, John Lehman.No dissenting views were allowed tointrude, beyond the deferential in-quiries of MacNeil and Lehrer, bothof whom, it should be said, are verybad interviewers, usually ignorantand always timid. By contrast, TedKoppel of ABC's "Nightline"-a farbetter show, covering the same sortof turf-is a veritable tiger in inter-rogatory technique.

The spectrum of opinion thus of-fered is one that ranges from thecorporate right to cautious center-liberal. One should not be misled,by the theatrical diversity of viewsdeployed on the program, into think-ing that a genuinely wide spectrumof opinion is permitted. Molderingpiles of "MacNeil/Lehrer" tran-scripts before me on my desk attestto the fact.

The show would be nothing with-out Robert ("Robin") MacNeil. Ca-nadian, of course, with a layer ofhigh seriousness so thick it sticksto the screen, MacNeil anchors the

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show to tedium and yanks at thehawser every time the craft showsany sign of floating off into un-charted waters. He seems to havelearned-on the evidence of his re-cent memoir, The Right Place at theRight Time*-the elements of his

. deadly craft in London, watchingthe BBC and writing for Reuters.

MacNeil is a man so self-righ-teously boring that he apparentlyhad no qualms in setting down thetruth about his disgraceful conductin Dallas on November 22, 1963.MacNeil was there covering Ken-nedy's visit for NBC. The shotsrang out and he sprinted to the near-est telephone he could find. It sohappens that he dashed, withoutknowing its significance, into theTexas Book Depository: "As I ranup the steps and through the door,a young' man in shirt sleeves wascoming out. In great agitation Iasked him where there was a phone.He pointed inside to an open spacewhere another man was talking ona phone situated next to a pillarand said, 'Better ask him.' I ran in-side .... "

Later, MacNeil writes, "I heard ontelevision that a young man calledOswald, arrested for the shooting,worked at the Texas Book Deposi-tory and had left by the front doorimmediately afterward. Isn't thatstrange, I told myself. He must havebeen leaving just about the time Iwas running in. . . ."

Later still, William Manchesterdemonstrated that there was a 95percent certainty that MacNeil hadmet Oswald. Any reporter, any hu-man, with anything other than trea-cle in his veins, would naturallymake much of the coincidence anddivert children, acquaintances, andindeed a wider public, with interest-ing accounts of Oswald's demeanorat this significant moment. Not Mac-Neil. With Pecksniffian virtuousness,he insists that the encounter wasmerely "possible," and that "it istitillating, but it doesn't matter verymuch."

Such is the aversion to storytell-ing, the sodden addiction to themundane, that produced "MacNeil/

* Little, Brown, $13.95.

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Lehrer." Like an Exocet missile,MacNeil can spot a cliche, a patchof ennui, and home in on it withdreadful speed. Witness his pro-clamation of political belief:

Instinctively, I find it moresatisfying to belong with thosepeople in all countries who puttheir trust in Man's best quality,his rational intellect and its abil-ity to recognize and solve prob-lems. It is distressing that therecent course of American pol-itics has caused that trust to beridiculed or dismissed as somesort of sojt-headedness, inappro-priate to a virile nation con-fronting the dangerous world. Itwill be unfortunate if being a"liberal" remains an embarrass-ment, if young Americans shouldbegin to believe that conserva-tives are the only realists.

Each has its absurd extreme:liberalism tending to inspire fool-ish altruism and unwarranted op-timism; conservatism leading tounbridled selfishness and para-noia. Taken in moderation, Iprefer the liberal impulse: it isthe impulse behind the greatforces that have advanced man-kind, like Christianity. I find ithard to believe that Jesus Christwas a political conservative,whatever views are espoused inhis name today.

For all my instinctive liberal-ism, my experience of politics inmany countries has not left mewedded to any particular politi-cal parties. Rather, I have foundmyself politically dining a lacarte, on particular issues.

This is the mind-set behind "Mac-Neil/Lehrer,' "I have my own in-stinctive aversion to being snowed,"he writes at another point. "Themore I hear everyone telling methat some public person is wonder-ful, the more I ask myself, Can hereally be all that wonderful? Con-versely [for MacNeil there is alwaysa "conversely" poking its head roundthe door], I never believe anyonecan be quite as consistently terribleas his reputation."

Hitler? Attila the Hun? Pol Pot?Nixon? John D. Rockefeller? I'mafraid that's all we have time for to-night. We've run out of time. Goodnight. •

HARPER'S/ AUGUST 1982