Print as Hot Medium?

During O.J. Simpson's criminal trial one day in Los Angeles, F. Lee Bailey unfurled his famous ferocity. Then he took up a scalpel, brought it down on words uttered by a witness, and opened some potential holes.

That bit of drama escaped the eye of the courtroom camera. Although it was rich in visual pizazz, it was not shown or even mentioned on television newscasts. And yet its occurrence was attested, in so many words, by a well-credentialed first-hand witness: Linda Deutsch of the Associated Press. Deutsch's story was passed along, as straight news, by scores of local editors to millions of newspaper readers.

Demonstrated by this episode is the falsity of the notion that television is the more pictorial, or visually stimulating, of our news media.

Video journalists, to be sure, dote on spectacle. Few happenings qualify as TV news unless they can be told and can be shown, by way of filmed footage or some other form of pictorial representation. Television news people go to immense trouble to fill receivers' screens not with talking heads or printed texts but with fiery wrecks, with devastating storms and pitched battles, with strenuous movements performed in exotic, picturesque, locations (or at least with correspondents talking in front of news sites).

In the use of verbal imagery, however, authors of scripts for lead-ins, voice-overs and on-scene video reports work under an artistic handicap. Their narratives must be (harumph) metaphysically and iconically conventional. Their prose must point to events that can occur in what we take to be the real world.

Print-media scribes, and their counterparts in radio, are not so constrained.

Unfettered by a need to link their narratives to filmed footage, they can treat ferocities, along with umbrellas and flags, as (un)furlable objects. They can beguile, or boggle, the mind's eye with tales of opening potential holes. They can 'report' (as was demonstrated on national public radio) that on a certain November day (not a recent one) "the American electorate went to the polls and voted for the status quo."

In their efforts to portray actualities in terms that are vivid and gripping, print journalists use some figures of speech over and over again. Thus we have:

Utterance as physical attack. News media have been accused once or twice of over-publicizing crimes, conflicts and violence. Less often recognized, however, is the journalistic practice of inventing acts of newsworthy violence. Reporters and editors do just this when they confound non-violent deeds with assault and battery. Specifically, they equate selected acts of speech with lashing, bashing, killing, cutting to pieces, shooting, knocking, or scalpel-wielding. But this practice is confined largely to print and auditory reporting. If it were done on video, we would expect to see the pictures.

Freakspeakmanship. No less popular with video-free journalists is another way of spicing, or enhancing visually, the reporting of speech acts. The need here is substantial. Most of the events that qualify as "news" are human utterances. And many of those utterances do not get said anywhere. They occur un-photogenically in telephone conversations, in official reports, or in papers, faxes, or electronic-mail messages that are delivered to media organizations as "releases."

Print journalists are better positioned than video scribes to endow speech act stories with dramatic features. They meet the challenge not only by confounding words with sticks and stones but also by enriching, so to speak, the identities of cited vociferators. They publicize words uttered lately by loquacious buildings ("the White House virtually ruled out..."; "the Pentagon announced"), by companies ("General Motors said"), cities ("Moscow, watching...with unconcealed glee, voiced the opinion that..."), by streets (Wall; "Downing Street admitted"), by circles ("scientific circles say"; "political and legal circles claim"; "Gold Coast property CIRCLES were ABUZZ this week after...."), by newsprint spaces ("this column has said repeated-ly"), and by nation-states ("West Germany and Sweden spoke out strongly for human rights [while] Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia attacked what they called the 'malevolent plans' of...").

["North Korea stunned the world by threatening to...".]

Lateralism. Those striking oral events are hard to show on television. So, oddly enough, are many movements that evidently rate as news. These are lateral, as well as occasional forward and backward, movements. They are ascribed to remarkably mobile entities. As dePICted in the Press, nation-states engage not only in newsworthy nattering, but also in shuffling ("France Shifts to Right"; "Oregon stepped forward..."; "Canada Tilts to the Right"). Those sinister and dexter steps, turns, tilts, shifts and rushes occur most commonly in the wake of national elections. Moreover, the steps go in directions that are designated mysteriously by capital letters: "the Left"; "the Right." They would, one might suppose, make great pictures. But they are not screened on the 10 o'clock news.

Animism. The imputation of speech and movement to nation-states is part of a larger pattern, in which print journalists bestow human qualities on all sorts and sizes of objects. Thus, nation-states reportedly engage not only in mouthing and moving, but also in sleeping and waking ("America awoke yesterday to the screams of...."), in kneeling (Bulgaria is "on its knees"--but also is held in the "embrace" of an "economic crisis"), in pondering ("Turkey is considering changes in..."), in shrugging ("China put aside its internal problems..."), in making faces ("our nation grimaced"), or in calming down ("a grateful but weary Guatemla returned to a state of peace Sunday").

No less animated, judging from newspaper reports, are programs ("After being knocked out for nine months, Alamance County's Head Start program is scrambling off the canvas..."; "Like so many other federal programs, disability insurance has lost sight of..."; Medicaid is "a program that asks few ques-tions no matter how high the bills"; "From its inception...Head Start has prided itself on..." ), as well as hospitals ("Duke Hospital is restructuring its upper management"),and currencies ("dollar battled on in offshore foreign exchange trading"; the British pound "was back off its knees, but still groggy...";"The dollar--feeling weak in the knees--fell 3.5 per cent").

So are roadways ("The approach to the bridge is crawling"; "The expressway is creeping"), markets ("The foreign exchange market shrugged off yesterday's balance of payments data, seeing the result as well within expectations"; "When it became clear the British people supported the Falklands War, a wary and watchful stock market relaxed and prospered"), committees ("It's a sunlit Thursday morning, and around a long wooden table, a college admissions committee squints at thick books of computer printouts..."), worlds ("... Sadat stunned the world yesterday by..."; "Claims that some doctors have refused patients their personal file to deter them from an American cancer cure have rocked the medical world"; "The sporting world was in turmoil last night after..."), and numbers ("Real estate and building statistics are on a dramatic upswing following a downtown after the bubble sagged").

It is conceivable, of course, that those luminous verbal images are not meant to be taken at, well, face value. When they put weapons in the hands or mouths of talkers, endow corporations with voice boxes, and treat nation-states as erratic pedestrians and programs as pugilists, journalists use figurative language. They do so, perhaps, in order to compete with television's visual impact. They may do so also in order to blend exposition, or telling what has happened, with situational appreciation, or identifying the social implications of happenings. For this purpose, similes and metaphors can be serviceable. Perhaps they are especially serviceable when mixed and mashed, becoming what William Safire has called malaphors.

Matters of state have accordingly been illuminated by journalists' judgments that a certain politician is skating on thin ice as he wrestles with demons within his party and without, or that the death of another Indian politician has left a giant question mark hanging over his country. Similar in purpose may be putative reports that a political revolving door has spewed out one man and swept in another even while hemorrhaging, or that a certain presidential candidate is wielding a double-edged sword in the shape of a boomerang that is likely to come home to plague him and beat him by a large majority.

Newspaper readers have been invited on memorable occasions also to 'see' that a hoary old chestnut has raised its head again, that an underground shaft has been shelved, that a planned truck blockade has failed to get off the ground, that a certain periodical loves nothing more than to catch tall poppies with their pants down.

Washington Post person George Will has wondered in print whether certain "loopholes" would come "seeping back." Those were not the same loopholes that, according to Australian correspondent Tess Livingston, were prevented from becoming a big problem by being nipped in the bud.

New York Times readers were invited, on a crisp October morn in 1992, to behold a "savings and loan mess" which was "swept under the rug" before it could "explode." Whether commercial banks "are a similar time bomb," Stephen Greenhouse opined, "has emerged" as a political "issue." Other members of the working Press have notified their readers that:

• Ambassador W. has been sitting on one of the hotter seats of diplomacy, striving to bridge the gap.
• The (political) mothballs operation here puts the handwriting on the wall in other States.
• The battle over Eno Drive...is poised to reignite.
• The jewel in the crown of Britain's welfare state, the National Health Service, is bleeding to death.
• Tentacles which are reaching out from a recently opened Pandora's box could prove to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

They don't cover scenes like that on the boob tube.