Woods Workbench

While browsing through The Ayn Rand Letter, I found this interesting observation by Ayn Rand about the televised Senate Watergate hearings:

Television has a peculiar power to reveal the essence of a man’s character.  One learns more from a televised image than from a face-to-face encounter; an act that may work in a drawing room is magnified and stripped away, leaving the man naked.  The camera seems to photograph, not men’s faces, but their souls.  It is a wonderful invader of psychological privacy, more potent than a lie detector.  Most politicians should run from a TV camera, invoking the Fifth Amendment.

Whatever other truth the televised Senate hearings on Watergate may disclose or obfuscate, there is one truth which they have resoundingly succeeded in disclosing:  the characters of men representing a good cross section of both political parties.  We had a chance to see, under the luminous microscope of a television camera, the kind of men who run this country’s government.  “Government,” to most people, is a big, vague, floating abstraction; the hearings concretized it.  The question I would like to ask the viewers who stuck it out to the end of the first phase, is:  Do you feel respect for the men on either side of the long committee table? [“The Principals…,“ ARL, Vol. II, No. 19, p 209 in bound edition].

Despite our media-savvy pols of today, this observation still hold true.  It is not as evident in sound-bites and commercials; however, if they are left to speak uninterrupted in front of a camera, then they inevitably show themselves.

Negative examples of this television effect are easy to find such as Senator Boxer during the Rice confirmation hearings, and Rep. Delay’s attacks on the judiciary regarding the Schiavo case.  On television, the pragmatic President Bush alternates between inspired rhetoric and debilitating altruistic bromides like a metronome within the same speech.  As examples of television displaying politicians in a generally good light, I would cite Secretary of War Rumsfeld, and Vice President Cheney.

Meanwhile, despite the television effect, the unfavorable characteristics of individuals depicted in Ayn Rand’s description of the Watergate hearing, which she had cited as paralleled in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, are still prominent in politics today; the names have changes but the vices remain the same.

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