TV’s ‘reality’ just politics

Sunday, Aug. 19, 2007 | 1:15 a.m.

The photos and television and YouTube screens showed Sen. Hillary Clinton sitting at a kitchen table with an unassuming nurse and her three children, eating a meal of comfort food and talking about - in the parlance of politics - "kitchen table issues" such as college tuition and health care.

Clinton was in Las Vegas last week to shadow Michelle Estrada, a nurse at a St. Rose Dominican hospital. They worked together for a few hours at the hospital before retiring to the Estrada home for dinner.

The dinner scene played out with warmth, light humor and empathy for a family that works hard and plays by the rules and just wants to live out the American Dream, and, gee, when I'm president I'll help you get there.

What viewers didn't see, though, were the "boom mics" - those long poles with fuzzy microphones at the end, which hung over the dinner table. They saw Clinton and the family in a warm glow, but not the powerful lights required for the effect. Nor did viewers see the three camera crews, the still photographers, the image mavens or the two print reporters on a nearby couch, taking notes .

The Estrada home, with its slightly raised and open-ended dining room that made for perfect camera angles, had been turned into a sitcom set. The only thing missing was the laugh track, and although no one actually uttered, "Quiet on set!" it was understood. Everyone whispered.

In short, the event that occurred on television was much different from what was seen by the naked eye.

In the words of the late social theorist Daniel Boorstin, it was a "pseudo-event" that became real and meaningful only when transmitted to millions of viewers. "Nothing is really real unless it happens on television," Boorstin said.

Clinton is not alone in the use of faux authenticity. Every campaign does it, and President Bush and his people have mastered it.

These events have come to dominate American politics, and a campaign's success can often be measured by how well it creates artifice that seems real.

"So much of a presidential campaign is totally staged for television," said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "One gets this sense that it was all done for the sake of the cameras, but very little would go on in presidential campaigns if it weren't for the cameras."

For some media and political theorists, this is lamentable, a dishonest degrading of democratic discourse. What remains to be seen is the effect of the Internet, and whether the new medium will give Americans a more unfiltered view of our candidates.

The creation of realistic televisual illusion in politics goes back decades, but reached an impressive height in 1968, when Richard Nixon's advertising and public relations men successfully created the "new Nixon," as chronicled by Joe McGinniss in "The Selling of the President 1968."

The Nixon campaign hired Roger Ailes, who had been producer of the "Mike Douglas Show , " to put together programs that seemed like panel shows, with Nixon taking questions.

Ailes, who later would do similar work for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and is now head of Fox News, showed particular interest in the composition of the panel: "You'd know what I'd like? A good, mean Wallaceite cab driver. Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, mac, what about these n-----s?' "

The point was to appeal to Southern racists while giving Nixon a chance to gently distance himself from them.

Kevin Phillips, the campaign's "ethnic specialist," considered the Ailes approach crude and unscientific and took over panel selection. (Phillips is now a liberal critic of the Republican governing coalition he was so instrumental in creating.)

If an ethnic specialist didn't advise on the recent Clinton event, then the organizers had a remarkable stroke of luck: Estrada is white (check), and married to a Mexican-American (check.) She works at a Catholic hospital (check), but is Mormon (check.)

A question worth asking is, why does the public view the performances as at all credible?

To begin with, a significant chunk of the public is cynical about these events and lends them no credence, according to public opinion polling. This explains the hunger for "real" moments - the impolitic remark, the combing of hair - so popular on YouTube. Consultants combat this cynicism by striving ever harder to create scenes that seem unguarded and authentic. (These can fall flat, like former Vice President Al Gore and his wife overzealously kissing.)

Media organizations, including the Sun, sometimes don't reveal the true nature of the psuedo events. Why not? To do so might threaten their ability to get access to the candidate later.

More complexly, though, "We've become accustomed to this pseudo-realism," said Larry Gross, director of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

In a sense, he noted, politics on television was the first reality show, and now there's a "seamless interweaving" of politics, reality programming, commercials, and now even traditional script-driven programming, much of which uses the single-camera technique of documentaries.

"The audience is not encouraged to think that the kids in the house are being followed around by a camera crew," Gross said, referring to the MTV show, "Real World," in which the audience believes it is watching the "real" world of attractive young people.

Writing in The Boston Globe, Ken Sanes put it this way: "The ability to manipulate simulations is a form of power and the inability to see through simulations is a form of powerlessness. Those who manipulate appearances, today, exercise power over those who are taken in by appearances."

For Gross, it's of a piece: "We have a phony political system." He argued that the country is too large to have an authentic discourse among people.

He does see a glint of hope in the unfiltered images of the Internet, he said. It was YouTube that showed former Virginia Sen. George Allen using a racist slur and likely drove him from office.

YouTube also allows a candidate to film a serious 30-minute policy address and get it out to the world, for very little cost.

"But there's no particular evidence someone would want to see a 30-minute speech," Gross said.

His colleague at the Annenberg School, Tom Hollihan, is less pessimistic.

The pseudo-events aren't entirely unlike life, Hollihan said. In one sense, we're all on a stage and always performing, he noted, channeling Shakespeare and the French philosopher Baudrillard.

He said the key is for people to become skilled and literate consumers of media, to develop a critical faculty so they can distinguish truth from falsity.

The political class, meanwhile, will continue to manipulate - long ago political pros realized that electoral decisions are often emotional and ethereal, rather than rational. So, for instance, Reagan made people feel good, and he won reelection in a landslide.

The question that will decide the 2008 election may be whether Clinton can evoke the same feeling when she's in TV kitchens pretending to help out with the dishes in front of camera crews.