Accent on Living

IF television interests are as smart as they seem to be, they will use the post-election interval for entrenching themselves solidly in Washington. They cleaned up with the conventions. They have set the pace through the campaign. They will undoubtedly leave little for the A.M.’s on election night.

TV has much to offer the politician and the public official who is willing to operate in terms of the present instead of the past. If the next cabinet, for example, includes men who know what they are about and why, those men might fare very comfortably indeed with TV.

But the newspapers still believe that the press conference ought to remain their own private domain. The whole standard of news gathering would suffer, they argue, and the public would fall for all sorts of catchpenny tricks if TV were to horn in.

There is no reason why the public should draw more foolish conclusions from what it sees on TV than from what it reads in its newspapers. On the contrary, if TV can arrange a place for itself in press conferences, a good deal of inanity would rapidly be replaced by substance.

In the abundance of its waste matter, there is little in human affairs to equal a verbatim transcript of the classic press conference, in which the cagey “spokesman” for the agency head or cabinet member explains why nothing can be said, at. the moment, about this subject or that. The most, grudging hint, in such conferences, is hailed as news and, helped along by headlines, is made to seem like news. It may seem good news, or it may seem bad, according to the twist which the newspaper’s “policy” sees fit to give it, but no matter: the ritual has been performed, the press corps has gone through the same motions — only fewer of them, perhaps — that satisfied it in days gone by.

Radio has taken most of the steam out of this operation. By the time a newspaper can come out with a short bulletin and a headline, radio has long since broadcast the story and the commentators are picking its bones. Nevertheless, the papers persist in the notion that radio is a stepchild and TV an out-and-out trespasser.

The newspaper coverage of President Truman’s speech last March, when he tucked into his prepared text at the last moment the announcement that he would not be a candidate, was a ludicrous case in point. The early edition of the New York Times had gone to press before the President made known his decision, and its news story reported that he did not take the occasion to disclose his plans. The upshot was that the Times was congratulated for the elaborateness and speed with which it substituted correct copy in later editions.

The Chicago conventions were a more protracted embarrassment for the press. Watching them on TV was much better than a seat in the press section— better than a seat anywhere, just as TV gives a better view of football than a seat on the 50-yard line. A news reporter could probably cover a convention more efficiently from TV than on the spot, and with TV he could always find out from Elmer Davis what was actually going on. One suspects this will be the case again on election night.