Debate on radio? Worth a listen

As GOP and television executives wrestle with how best to stage the initial televised party debate with up to 18 or 19 presidential candidates, perhaps unfairly squeezing the field to a more manageable number, here’s a solution:  scrap the cameras and just hold the debate on radio. 

Organizers could then include all the candidates and not merely a smaller group based on the shaky criterion of name recognition polls.   And as long as all candidates have equal access to a studio microphone linked to the listening audience, fitting all onto a TV stage no longer matters.

{mosads}Besides, much is amiss with televised debates, as the late historian Daniel J. Boorstin argued in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, first published in 1962.   Boorstin considered the first series of televised presidential debates between Kennedy and Nixon and found they “were remarkably successful in reducing great national issues to trivial dimensions” and that “Far more interest was shown in the performance than in what was said.”  These judgments remain valid for their modern successors.

The conceit of televising debates, as somberly intoned by TV executives and others, is they provide voters a chance to see and hear the candidates side by side, in the Lincoln-Douglas tradition.  Bunk.  As Boorstin accurately divined after 1960, a candidate’s “ability, while standing under klieg lights, without notes, to answer in two and a half minutes a question kept secret until that moment, had only the most dubious relevance – if any at all – to his real qualifications to make deliberate Presidential decisions . . .”     

In televised debates, seeing is believing, if not necessarily thinking.  Edward M. Fouhy, the late respected television journalist and a presidential debate producer himself, once criticized reporter-colleagues for concentrating on listening to televised presidential debates.  Instead, Fouhy wrote:  “I’ll be doing what smart viewers at home will be doing:  watching more than listening.”  For Fouhy, and many others, George H.W. Bush’s looking at his wristwatch during a debate was television at its best, capturing something Highly Revealing.   The supposed insight was that Bush didn’t want to be there, he didn’t care about talking to the American people.  Well.

Did Bush 41 ever look at his watch while assembling a successful global coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, or when he overcame French and British reservations to help East and West Germany reunite? And if he did, so what?  Did Al Gore’s on-camera sighing while debating George W. Bush offer reliable insight into how Gore might have governed as president?  Really?  Sigh.

If the debate powers-that-be need a model of how informative and intelligent an only-listened-to argument can be, they have one: the (delayed) online recorded Supreme Court oral arguments, sometimes repeated on radio. One need not be a lawyer to follow the pointed-but-civilized back and forth.   When listening, it really is the argument, stupid, and not how the participants appear or gesture.   And except for their mothers, who cares what the advocates look like?

Without the television cameras and the often-erroneous “insight” they provide – Did Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow vs. JFK’s suntan really tell Americans something useful? –  a debate among presidential hopefuls on radio could be galvanizing, encouraging voters to follow more closely the articulated thinking of the candidates on the issues.  Candidates’ expressed thoughts, and not their facial expressions, would be key.  Moreover, the radio format could encourage debaters to speak in full sentences and even (gasp!) paragraphs, rather than rehearsed one-line sound bites favored by television. 

In listening, true, we would miss the camera zeroing in on a candidate’s face to show some beads of sweat, or being able to critique a debater’s hairstyle.   Yet voters could manage.   As Boorstin discussed, too, radio, like television, does not like “dead” airtime.  Yet radio is more forgiving of a pause to collect thoughts, while on television, with pregnant seconds “dragging” by, it can appear as if –aha! – a candidate has no thoughts to collect.   This can be a Highly Revealing TV moment.

Granted, it is too much to hope that the GOP, DNC or the candidates themselves would opt for debates only on radio (and streaming online, too).  Pumped-up TV duels heighten interest about the campaign and, at least on the GOP side for 2016, they could help propel a lesser-known candidate out of the pack. Fine. 

Yet why not try a public affairs experiment of holding one debate, one, ideally the first or early on, that is not televised?  We might all hear – and learn – something worthwhile.

 Hugins is a retired Foreign Service officer.