viz.

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

I’m weighing in late this week on last week’s first presidential debate.  Jay has usefully analyzed several covers of The New Yorker and illuminated for us a particular venue’s take on the candidates, while Todd has collected “Big Bird” memes to demonstrate a variety of reactions to Romney’s attack on PBS.  I’d like to pick up the popular culture trail where Todd has left off and discuss one meme in particular, posted by RealityTVGifs on October 4^th, the morning after the first debate.  The gif depicts presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama superimposed on Real Housewives of New Jersey Jacqueline Laurita and Teresa Giudice, respectively, while Andy Cohen, Executive VP of Bravo, moderates.  How can we read the comparisons this image invites—of the presidential debate to a Real Housewives reunion special?  Though there is obviously the potential of productive discussion in the relationship between Romney/President Obama and Laurita/ Guidice, what if we examine the less obvious juxtaposition: how can Andy Cohen inform our reading of moderator Jim Lehrer?

 First, some context for the source of the image: the GIF was taken from the RHONJ reunion special, Season 4 Part 1 of 3.  In RHONJ, as in all of the RH franchises, each season ends with a reunion, filmed after the season itself airs, in which the stars of the show comment on the previous season and respond to viewer questions.  Andy Cohen, the executive face of Bravo and a producer of all of the RH iterations, hosts each reunion.  Typically, Cohen takes a moderating role—that is, that he is guides the participants from sequence to sequence in one of two styles—either by asking the housewives questions directly (through which we might read Cohen as an agent for the television audience) or by selecting pre-submitted viewer questions (through which we might read the audience acting as their own agent).  In a particularly fraught reunion special (or at least, one which is presented as such), Cohen often finds himself breaking up unproductive ad-hominem attacks, even ones that result in physical violence. 

When asked about the altercation on his nighttime talk show Watch What Happens Live, Cohen remarked “[Teresa’s] stronger than she looks.” 

Cohen seems mostly interested in preserving conversational momentum, so while he usually tolerates (and in many cases, instigates) these personal attacks, he gives them a short leash; once the possibilities of confrontation exhaust themselves, Cohen reclaims authority over the pacing and content of the narrative being produced and makes a concentrated effort to shift the focus onto a more productive subject.  The parallels between Cohen’s role as “drama moderator” and Jim Lehrer’s as debate moderator are clear here: they both act as agents of a television audience whose responsibility is to facilitate a dialogue that efficiently reveals information.  

And, increasingly, we can see the overlap between presidential candidates and celebrity in these debates as news outlets evaluate performance based not just on the ways in which candidates address issues but on their “personality.”  But personality has two prongs here in relation to a discussion on presidential celebrity: personality as the performance of charisma and personality as the performance of intimacy.  Certainly, historians trace this trend to the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960, but it seems to me that charisma, rather than intimacy, is the overarching criteria of such discussions.  The key factor in discriminating between the cult of presidential personality and the cult of presidential celebrity, I think, is that the latter requires conflation of the public and the private—a construction that depends upon constant cultural labor in order to maintain an illusion of intimacy surrounding the political figure.  We can see the relation between charisma and intimacy rather neatly performed in the clip below from the Nixon/Kennedy debates, as Nixon responds to the moderator’s question about political experience much more specifically and with arguably greater rhetorical skill than Kennedy, but lauds the virtues of non-disclosure and closed-door politics (“The president has always maintained, and very properly so, that he is entitled to get what advice he wants from his cabinet…without disclosing that to anybody!”), while Kennedy adopts a strategy of broad, direct speech by reorienting the premise of the question: “The question really is, which candidate and which party can meet the problems that the United States is going to face in the ‘60s?”.

It is in the labor of cultivating intimacy that the role of the moderator in public discourse becomes crucial.  The moderator becomes an agent of the audience who has the ability to manipulate rhetorical distance to reveal or conceal information about those he is moderating.  Yet he does all of this in plain sight, presenting himself as a neutral, transparent entity, not an agent himself.  So go ahead and pay attention to that man behind the curtain, because he’s really one of “us”! 

The comparison of Lehrer to Cohen brings to attention our assumptions about a moderator’s neutrality, in part because in the hypermediated world of The Real Housewives, our attention is constantly drawn to medium.  The housewives not only engage in metadiscourse about the show itself but also discuss their treatment and participation in tabloid culture and online blogs.  In addition, Cohen’s role hardly remains passive.  Take, for instance, the clip below:

Real Housewives of NY "Shut Up" Montage at Reunion from Shannon Hatch on Vimeo.

As Cohen claims, the behavior of the housewives (in this case, of New York) was so egregious and that they “broke [him],” that is, that they forced him to break character or face.  Why?  Because, as Cohen in his frustration articulates, it is his responsibility to maintain the conversation’s productivity, which relies utterly on constantly maintaining intimacy between audience and housewife.  “Shut up and let me ask about it,”  “We’re going to get to it,”  “Let me keep going,” “Moving on,” and his constant plea to “Let her speak” all emphasize that conventional structure—the “ask and answer” confessional—is absolutely necessary to accomplish this intimacy, while his remarks about having lunch and “getting on with it” seem to emphasize the severity of its disruption.  So of course, once Cohen regains control of the reins, without skipping a beat, he looks straight into the eyes of socialite Sonja Morgan and, in utter earnestness, asks, “Sonja, tell me about Guam.” 

(Cohen’s “breaking point” has become its own gif, often implemented in topical tumblrs as a means of regaining control of a conversation from an aggressive adversary:)

 Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

Lehrer entered this round of presidential debates as a reluctant moderator, agreeing only to return to the hot seat after being promised that the format of the debate would differ from those of 2008.  (He again, this year, claims it will be his last.)  A long time contributor and advocate of public broadcasting, Lehrer on the surface couldn’t be more different than Cohen; he has long defended his exploratory, rather than pointed or aggressive, moderating style as the hallmark of enlightened debate.  ““If somebody wants to be entertained,” said Lehrer after the 2000 presidential debates, “they ought to go to the circus.”

And while he might paint himself as reluctant, the media has blasted him as “the worst moderator in the history of moderation.”  But, as our examination of Cohen’s moderation tactics show, Lehrer’s goal was not hypermediacy but immediacy.  His support for an open debate format and his almost willingness to be talked over all serve as evidence for Lehrer’s desire to appear as a transparent mechanism in the debate proceedings.  Ultimately, it seems for Lehrer, his job is done best when it is noticed least; a successful debate should appear as an intelligent conversation between the two candidates.  In fact, in response to criticism of his performance, Lehrer asked, “"I was thinking, `Weren't you paying attention to what was happening before your very eyes?” (In other words, why disrupt the intimacy between the debaters and the audience by bringing attention to the moderator?)  And, more significantly, Lehrer favored the new debate format, saying “I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

Ultimately, Lehrer’s tactics aided Romney’s victory, which political commentators across a variety of news media outlets have attributed to the strong, in-charge demeanor he was able to portray during the 90-minute debate.  But the question on many analyst’s minds now is articulated nicely by Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: “Mitt Romney’s challenge, with less than five weeks until Election Day, is to convince voters that the steady, decisive, in-command competitor who showed up for the first presidential debate is the real Mitt Romney.” I’ll be interested to see how the dynamic changes in next week’s debate, and how much moderator Candy Crowley and the town-hall format will have an effect on that change.