BLIND SPOTS: `SOUND BITE' NEWS MISSES OUT ON WHAT'S IMPORTANT

Satellites, electronic newsgathering, videotape and cable channels allow TV news to operate with virtually no restraints. Because of this dominance TV now possesses, and the overload it can now inflict, the question What does and what should TV news pay attention to? lies at the heart of our ability to govern ourselves. I believe that the norms and habits of TV news now threaten to undermine our collective ability to respond as a nation to the most serious problems we face. To illustrate my point, I'll rely heavily on media coverage of our budget deficits and spiraling national debt.

Responsible economists of every stripe agree that this debt burden threatens our children and grandchildren's standard of living. Yet what I'll call the eight blind spots of television news have left our citizens poorly informed as to the dimensions of our fiscal problems and, therefore, unequipped to respond in a way equal to the challenge we now face.

Our first blind spot is the Blind Spot of Visuals, the notion that "good pictures equal good TV journalism." Governance is about ideas, and their manifestation is words. A medium that is uncomfortable with words is necessarily uncomfortable with ideas. As Robert MacNeil laments, the idea "is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone, but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement . . . Visual stimulation is a substitute for thought."

In short, our public discourse is too often defined by pictures or by the incredible shrinking sound bite down from an average of 42 seconds in the 1968 presidential campaign to an amazing 10 seconds in 1988.

Budget summits, for example, provide a melodramatic news "event." Each party's elected leaders spar publicly and jockey for position while a fuse the inevitable negotiating deadline burns away. Suspense builds, government shutdowns are threatened, a kind of theater unfolds. Then one day a deal is struck and a group photo is taken with smiles all around. This day probably three or four minutes will be devoted to the story, although the real story, how the revenue and expense numbers will work, gets scant attention. Later it will become clear that the numbers haven't worked, that the deficit and the national debt continue to grow. Since the public doesn't know how the numbers were supposed to work, they're left disillusioned and distrustful. Is it any wonder that the public is losing respect not only for the government but for the media as well?

The second and related blind spot is the Blind Spot of Stenography that unwritten code that too often defines "news" as being what our public officials say or do; and TV's reluctance to challenge an official view without another, dissenting official view to lean on. All of us can recite the stock rat-a-tat news narrative in our sleep: "In Washington today Sen. X declared y. But this view was immediately contested by Sen. Q, who declared z." When TV newsrooms practice video stenography, the only public problems we're made aware of are the problems on which our politicians have been briefed and which they are willing to discuss. And this means enormous problems may go unreported. Stenography journalism kept the S&L fiasco off the evening news until it was too late and keeps our budget failures invisible.

Hand-in-hand with the Blind Spot of Stenography is its cousin, the Acceptance of the Lame Response. Even when they pose the right question, correspondents seldom note that politicians are full of flimflam when they assert that we can solve our budget problems by cutting defense, ending pork barrel spending or scrapping foreign aid. Anyone who spends half an hour looking at the federal budget even an FCC chairman knows that such measures don't even come close. They also know that reform of our "entitlements" programs Social Security, Medicare and military and civil service pensions must be part of the solution.

The tendency to accept inadequate answers is fueled partly by our fourth blind spot, the Blind Spot of Ignorance. Nothing is easier for a public official than bamboozling journalists who don't do their homework.

How else can we explain why not a single TV news organization covering the 1990 budget deal explained that, despite bipartisan moans about cutting spending to the bone, federal spending increased 8 percent?

With the groundwork we've now laid, our final four blind spots can be catalogued quickly. There's the Blind Spot on Spending, in which TV news invariably equates more government spending with solving more problems, though that hasn't worked in the past and we're now in debt to our eyeballs. There's the Blind Spot of Pettiness, in which sideshows like the House bank fiasco get dissected for weeks while the seemingly intractable and core problems like the deficit get scarcely a sound bite.

There's the Blind Spot of Celebrity, in which brand-name TV newspeople grow to love their status more than their duty. By posing a question about "an issue," the celebrity journalist often acts as though he's done his duty when in fact he's merely enacting a kabuki-able ritual that prompts the public official's kabuki-like evasive response. Yet without the knowledge to poke holes in that "non-answer answer," the celebrity has no resort but to move quickly to the next question. Is it too subversive to suggest that some of the resources now bankrolling superstar news salaries might be better devoted to research that would permit informed interviews?

And finally there is the Blind Spot of Fickleness, the mysterious hit-and-run, ebb-and-flow rhythm that characterizes TV news coverage. At the dawn of the Bush administration, you may recall, drugs were the biggest peril facing the nation, and the networks went into overdrive documenting the scourge. A year later a drug segment was rare and not because all our crack addicts kicked their habit.

But the camera had moved on, as it always does, as it always will, until TV journalists remain true to some vision of what's important as opposed to being faithful only to what's new.

Alfred C. Sikes is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He is a native of Sikeston.