The Front Runner (All the Truth Is Out Movie Tie-in). Matt Bai

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СКАЧАТЬ hope and heroism of a new generation.

      It would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League–educated boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become other than Woodward and Bernstein—which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.

      For decades after the break-in at the Watergate complex, virtually every political scandal of note would be instantly packaged using the same evocative suffix that had made heroes of Woodward and Bernstein, even though generations of Americans couldn’t have told you what its actual origin was; the media trumpeted the arrival of “Contragate” and “Troopergate” and “Monicagate.” In a sense, the Hart fiasco, coming thirteen years after Nixon’s resignation, marked the inescapable end point of all the post-Watergate idolatry in the media, and the logical next phase in our political coverage. It marked the start of an era when reporters would vie endlessly to re-create the drama and glory of the industry’s most mythologized moment, no matter how petty or insignificant the excuse.

      And even if you couldn’t be Woodward or Bernstein, exactly, you might still have a shot at getting relatively rich and famous, thanks to the evolving ethos of TV news. Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, and within two years the network began airing what would become its signature program: Crossfire. The initial hosts of this televised debate were the liberal journalist Tom Braden and the conservative Pat Buchanan (who would interrupt his tenure, between 1985 and 1987, to serve as Reagan’s communications director). But the evolving cast mattered less than the conceit, which in many ways gave rise to the modern scourge of unending Washington punditry, with glib debate as a cheap replacement for actual news; within a few years, even the staid network Sunday shows that had been around for decades would come to resemble Crossfire in their penchant for partisan clashes and valueless prognostication. (Any thought that CNN, in hindsight, might regret what it had wrought on the political culture was banished in 2013, when the network decided to bring back the show, with Newt Gingrich on the right and Stephanie Cutter, a sharp-tongued Democratic aide, on the left.)

      The same year that Crossfire premiered, a local Washington station started syndicating a weekend show called The McLaughlin Group, on which the host, the former Nixon advisor John McLaughlin, fired off abrupt questions at a panel of print journalists who were supposed to opine on all things political, like clairvoyants at a carnival show. The show would become enough of a pop culture sensation that by 1990 Saturday Night Live would be spoofing it regularly, with Dana Carvey doing a dead-on impersonation of the way McLaughlin bullied his guests to weigh in on every imaginable topic. Issue number three: life after death! Some pundits say it doesn’t exist! Theologians disagree! Is there an afterlife?

      The boomer brand of newspaperman, cocky and overeducated compared to his predecessors, coveted a cameo on Crossfire or a seat on McLaughlin’s stage, which conferred a new kind of instant celebrity—at least among your colleagues. Shows like these ratcheted up the pressure on reporters to separate themselves from the pack by whatever means they could. And such venues contributed mightily to a shallower conversation about politicians generally, since, increasingly as the years went on, puffed-up panelists were just as likely to speculate on the personalities of candidates—more likely, in fact—as they were on the ideas and issues that were ostensibly under discussion.

      And CNN’s existence itself had only been made viable by two relatively recent and revolutionary innovations: the replacement of film with modern videotape, and the proliferation of mobile satellite dishes that could bring news to you instantly, from anywhere. Until the late 1970s, the only way a network could “go live” from the scene of breaking news was to get the telephone company to install expensive audio and video lines—a process that took weeks to complete. You could manage that for an inauguration or an Olympics or some other planned event, but if you wanted to report today’s unscheduled news from some remote location, then you needed to hand the film to some guy on a motorcycle … who would speed it to a studio … where it would be developed, synced with sound, and fed into a Telecine machine that converted film into video … and ultimately couriered or transmitted on permanent lines back to editors in New York, or maybe edited in some local studio—by which time the deadline for the evening news might well have passed.

      But then came the advent of what was known in the business as “ENG”—electronic news gathering—which relied on lighter and more portable videotape cameras, freeing networks from the shackles of film. And now that videotape could be transmitted, almost miraculously, from a new generation of mobile satellites. The first satellite dishes, unwieldy and temperamental, arrived strapped to the roofs of bulky trucks (with their own onboard generators) in the early 1980s. In 1986, CNN began issuing its correspondents “flyaway dishes” that could fold up and move around the world, which were destined to become the industry standard. The 1988 campaign would be the first where the three networks and this new, twenty-four-hour cable channel would be able to easily bring you updates and interviews from any location relevant to a breaking story.

      When Joe Trippi, then a young aide on the Hart campaign, arrived in the remote reaches of Troublesome Gulch to rescue Lee Hart on the first full day of the scandal, he was stunned to find a row of dishes lined up on the gravel drive like an invading army at the gate. Within a few years, this would be a familiar sight even to Americans who had nothing to do with making or covering the news, but in 1987 it seemed as if aliens had landed from Mars. “Holy shit,” Trippi remembered thinking. “They move now.”

      As Trippi and his colleagues on the campaign were about to learn, videotape and satellite technology had tremendous implications not just for the transmission of news—that is, how it literally got on air, and how fast—but also for the industry’s notion of what constituted it. Before the mid-eighties, which stories got on the air, and how prominently they were featured, depended almost entirely on their objective news value—that is, on how relevant they were to the public interest. But now that calculation had a lot more to do with immediacy; suddenly a story could be captivating without being especially important. After all, how could you lead with economic data when a little girl was lost in some God-forsaken well, and your correspondent was live on the scene?

      What might have been a minor story in years past could now explode into a national event, within hours, provided it had the element of human drama necessary to keep viewers planted in their seats. Even as Hart prepared to announce his campaign at Red Rock, for instance, the media had become thoroughly obsessed with two sensational stories. The first concerned Fawn Hall, who worked as a secretary for Colonel Oliver North, the star of the Iran-contra hearings, and who had smuggled documents out of the White House in her boots and the back of her skirt. (The facts of the Iran-contra scandal itself, having to do with illegal arms sales to Iran in order to secretly finance an insurgency in Nicaragua, made for less compelling TV and weren’t as widely known.) The second story had to do with the disgrace and supposed extortion of Jim Bakker, a television evangelist accused of rape and adultery, and with his wife, Tammy Faye, whose blubbering, mascara-streaked face transfixed the nation for days.

      It was an omen of things to come.

      You could argue that all of this hinted at something corrosive not just in American media at the time, but in the culture as a whole. In 1985, the New York University professor Neil Postman published his treatise on the television age, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which stands even now as a stunning work of social criticism. Postman’s central thesis is worth revisiting. He declared that George Orwell’s fear for humanity, as depicted in 1984, had not come to pass; obviously, Americans in 1984 did not labor under the repression of an authoritarian, mind-controlling regime, nor did anything like that seem imminent. But Postman posited that by the mid-1980s we were well on our way, instead, to realizing Aldous Huxley’s disturbing vision in Brave New World—that of a citizenry lulled into docility and self-destruction СКАЧАТЬ