ANOTHER REASON TO PAY ATTENTION TO FOREIGN MEDIA

So President Bush is careful about staging his events so that they look good in the media. As Jeff Cooper notes, this is not particularly surprising as far as it goes, although it is in tension with Bush's image as a down-home, plainspoken, God-fearin' middle American type. (It's probably familiar to viewers of Pat Robertson and other televangelists, though.) Kevin Drum is a little coy today about his estimation of Bush's efforts here, but his earlier post is harsher. OxBlog's Daniel Urman is unqualifiedly impressed (no permalinks). And contra the administration's claims, Andrew Cline worries that Bush's achievements in stagecraft impede rather than contribute to public understanding of his policies.

No one seems to have said it yet, so I will: the problem here is not simply Bush's efforts, but the fact that the media allows itself to be played. One problem has got to be the way that camera operators and editors are trained in the U.S. For a comparative perspective, go and watch a typical German spot on a political event. There are always standard shots of what might be termed an ordinary view of the scene: cameras setting up, the field of journalists themselves, a bird's eye view of the whole scene, usually also someone preparing the stage or someone cleaning up afterwards. A good place to go for such spots is the German news icon, tagesschau.de. Even if you don't understand what they're saying, you'll still be struck at how German journalists portray political events as political events that are prepared, staged, covered, and then end at a specific point in time.

It would be pretty simple for the U.S. press to incorporate some of this more critical style of coverage into their own: just turn the camera around and show all of the other cameras covering the same event, for example. Don't allow your camera angles to be determined in advance by the politicians themselves: pick a funny angle for once. Try to think of the event as a staged event and show that fact as well.

EXAMPLE: Check out Tagesschau's coverage of Powell's visit in Berlin, for example. After the anchor introduces the segment, there is a shot of Powell and Fischer shaking hands. Immediately they cut to a shot of the press corps jotting stuff down. Some rhetoric from Fischer about "working together," then the fourth shot is extreme stage left, behind the lighting and over the heads of the press corps. Powell speaks. Then Shroeder and Powell approach another podium through a gauntlet of cameras, then a shot of journalists, sitting, with full gear, not necessarily paying attention. Schroeder speaks, Powell's walking on his way to another visit, then a shot behind a cameraman who is filming pols entering a building, then Angelika Merkel (CDU) speaks to someone else's camera, then a panoramic shot of the outdoor stage that apparently served as the spot for the Powell / Schroeder conference, ending with someone brushing the plastic sheeting underneath the podiums. Are German television journalists just better than those in the U.S.? Better at not being played, that is. Could be.

MORE: Papascott calls attention to an additional, more spectacular exampleof the German press refusing to be spun, and of one pol's attempt to fight back: Helmut Kohl's non-interview with the German news show Panorama, in which he at first refuses to talk with reporters from the show and then accuses them of treason. Other prominent conservative politicians don't come off very well either (Kohl's successor at the CDU's helm, Angelika Merkel, just says "alles klar" [like "fine, whatever"] when asked to comment), but Kohl's performance takes the cake. Wow.