Posted on 11/11/2003 6:49:32 AM PST by dirtboy
If CBS News were to come on the air tonight and announce that former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush had said things they never said — expressing contempt, say, for their wives or proposing war against Iran — it would take only minutes before everyone involved with the fiction was thrown out the door.
They'd be gone as well if the evening news had taken a true event, say a president's dalliance with an intern, and lacking film or tape of their first meeting, hired actors to stage a hug on the White House lawn.
Well, of course, the networks tell us, the news is supposed to be true. Dramas produced by the entertainment division are different. They have no such obligation to accuracy. They produce what are acknowledged to be historical fictions that aim to convey a higher truth. The audience, the networks contend, is not so dumb as to think the words put into the mouths of actors representing Ronald and Nancy Reagan — or Jessica Lynch and Elizabeth Smart and even their captors! — were all actually spoken by them. People are expected to know they are watching impersonations, not file footage, and that the atmosphere of the play and the essence of its personalities are the products of artistic deduction.
But even if an audience knows, what does it believe? And what was it expected to believe?
We all know that the people who gush about a Broadway show in a 30-second commercial are just actors impersonating ordinary theatergoers. But apparently a good number of us believe enough of what they say to go out and buy tickets to that show. Otherwise the producers would not waste money hiring the actors to speak those fictions. Producing believable fictions that have real consequence is one of the prized television arts.
Most Americans still know what Ronald Reagan looked like when he served in the White House. But if we were unable to shove aside that real memory to let our minds pretend that an actor is a plausible facsimile speaking plausible words, the moguls at CBS would never have invested their treasure in such an enterprise.
Because it delivers so much fact-based news, genuine information and documentary imagery, television asks to be believed whenever it presents real people with real names in supposedly real circumstances. Was that not the ultimate meaning of the quiz-show scandals of the 1950's? Those fake dramas, too, were the products of the networks' entertainment divisions. But their producers learned through bitter humiliation that the moment they presented real people with real names they had assumed an obligation to truth. Charles Van Doren, it turned out, was not as smart as he pretended to be on a program called "Twenty-One" and his sweaty search for answers in an isolation booth was a lie — highly entertaining, to be sure, but an intolerable lie nonetheless.
Television thrives by presenting an alternating stream of fact and fiction and therefore bears a special responsibility to distinguish between the two. Yet it seems determined to do just the opposite, to blend fact and fiction into an indistinguishable froth. For a season or two, reality entertainment recruited real people to suffer trials and tribulations; now real people are being hurled into comic stunts to achieve the pitch of sitcoms, like those misshapen guys on "Average Joe" who have been given a TV season to defy the laws of assortative mating and woo a comely maiden.
How long before some reality show imitates a once supremely effective radio drama? Imagine an interruption of the next episode of "C.S.I." so that a familiar newscaster can announce that a mysterious vehicle has landed in the New Jersey marshes and that strange-looking bipeds are walking around New York City. Ask yourself why you would object and you will know why "The Reagans" and "Saving Jessica Lynch" were irresponsible projects from the start. The reason is that some people — too many people in this time of terrorism — would believe such a report about an invasion from outer space. Indeed, they would deem it credible even if told soon enough that this time it was false.
So too with the claims that President Reagan had been cruelly indifferent to the victims of AIDS or that his wife secretly ruled the nation, like Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. To persuade people of the plausibility of an untruth is not only to lie, but to lie effectively. No claim of art or higher truth can justify such forgery.
Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The Times, is completing a history of the Cuban missile crisis.
It's morning in America.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.