Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image Making. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1993 by Bob Schieffer

Andre Agassi, the young tennis pro who wears hideous day-glo colors Land plays with his shirttail out, has been starting recently in a television commercial for Canon cameras in which--nicely cleaned up and hair combed--he declares that in today's world, "Image is everything."

Now comes Kiku Adatto, who is not your average day-glo, shirttail-out kind of person, to declare that Agassi is probably right. And, more important, Americans and their politics are the worse for it.

Adatto's name won't ring any bells with American politicians or voters--she has been a lecturer at Harvard and studies American culture--but around television newsrooms she is known as the "Sound Bite Lady." It was Adatto who set network news on its collective ear when she sat down with a stopwatch and timed just how long presidential candidates were allowed to speak on evening news broadcasts during the 1988 campaign.

Her findings startled political scientists and other assorted observers, delighted a lot of television's print competitors, and, frankly, embarrassed many of us who were responsible for that year's campaign coverage. Adatto discovered that the average sound bite for candidates in 1988 was only 9.8 seconds, compared to an average of 42 seconds in 1968. At no time during the entire Bush-Dukakis campaign, which came when the Cold War was ending, when America had been plunged into record debt, and when our cities were overrun with crime and poverty, did a candidate for president speak uninterrupted for as long as a minute in any story broadcast on any network evening news program. Television reporters and producers had become so obsessed with pretty pictures from the campaign trail, Adatto observed, that they had little time left to report on what the campaign was about or even what the candidates were saying. In Picture Perfect, she goes beyond her original study and shows how television's obsession with pictures is part of a much larger problem--modem American culture's fascination with visual images, real and manufactured.

Adatto's new work is sometimes a frightening reminder of how easily we can be influenced by the images generated by advertising, still photography, and the movies; but, to me, her most pertinent observations are still about television campaign coverage.

Armed with her original findings and buttressed with scores of interviews with reporters, consultants, and strategists, Adatto concludes that viewers have become so accustomed to picture-driven campaign coverage that even when they know that the "reality" on the screen has been staged, they can still be seduced by the powerful images and diverted from the real issues of the campaign. More disturbingly, perhaps, she says we have become so conditioned to "photo opportunities" and the other hucksterism of modem campaigning that we have developed a certain fondness for it. We not only expect the hucksters to fool us; we want them to do it fight:

When [photography] was first invented in the nineteenth century, people were fascinated by the realism of the camera even as they acknowledged the artifice of the pose. In contemporary American culture our sensibility has shifted. Now we are alive as never before to the artifice of images. We pride ourselves on our knowledge that the camera can lie, that pictures can be fabricated, packaged, and manipulated. We have even developed an appreciation for artifice, an appreciation of slick production values whether in political campaigns, beer commercials, or a favorite movie.

She cites a political cartoon from the recent campaign season which shows two country boys talking politics on the front porch of a run-down general store. One tells the other, "I like Buchanan's sound bites, but Clinton and Tsongas have slicker production values." When Adatto first published her preliminary findings about the brevity of sound bites in The New Republic in 1990, the article touched off an uproar. Television reporters and their bosses at first huffed and puffed that the study missed the point--that it wasn't how long someone spoke but what was said that was important. Their favorite example was the phrase "I love you" which, it was pointed out, takes less than three seconds to say and requires no elaboration.

Happily, by the time Campaign '92 rolled around, news people were having second thoughts, and even the most ardent defenders of network news coverage were conceding that whatever else was right or wrong about television's political coverage, stories in which sound bites averaged less than ten seconds were a disgrace and ought to be corrected. In fact, the author quotes me to that effect in this book, and we should pause here for a Truth in Packaging Announcement: Readers of this review should be aware that I generally agreed with Adatto's earlier conclusions, encouraged her as she was writing this book, and she has been kind enough to quote me in several passages. Reviewing it did present a multitude of temptations ("The author really drives home her point when she quotes me as saying ... etc.") which I have tried to resist, but nonetheless, this review should be judged accordingly.