The Nicholas Effect by Reg Green

Author:Reg Green [Reg Green]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468900156
Publisher: Booktango
Published: 2009-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

TELEVISION COVERAGE WAS EQUALLY EXTENSIVE. The morning talk shows were the most disruptive. At 7:09 a.m. you’re unlikely to be scintillating. But with the time difference, it turned out to be 4:09 a.m. Pacific time. And for that we had to be sitting in our hardback Windsor chairs about thirty minutes earlier to make sure everything was working.

Even before that, the cameras and booms and mysterious black blinking boxes had to be set up. On those nights, we left the front door unlocked and tried to go to bed early. Typically, at around 2:00 a.m. the crew would arrive—shushing each other, setting up equipment with elaborate care but substantial noise, and occasionally tripping over Maggie’s randomly placed furniture. Sleep was impossible and, after a while, we didn’t try. We got up, made tea, and sat around getting in the way. Several times two or three of these competitive morning shows arrived one after the other, and the normally empty street in front of the house was lined with huge floodlit trucks, their generators filling the night air and bouncing signals off satellites.

In the order of earthly pleasures, looking closely into the face of Katie Couric or Jane Pauley as you wake up in the morning must surely rank high. But staring into a glass lens in the wee hours and trying to act natural is an experience of a different order. Certainly the medium is the message, imposing its own rules: instantaneous answers without the opportunity to back and fill as you do in a normal conversation, short takes that say only part of what you have in mind, answering something entirely different from what you were asked. I still find it disconcerting to be asked a two-part question, answer one part, pause for breath, and find the interviewer has moved on to something else. It goes against the grain too. One of the pleasures of going through life is to develop ever more subtle ways of expressing ideas. Now before a national audience—including your children’s teachers— you lapse into hasty oversimplifications you’d be ashamed of over the breakfast table.

“Just think of Julie Andrews singing ‘My Favorite Things,’” I advised Maggie before our first program. “Oh yeah, what’s that?” she asked. “When the bee stings. When the sound bites,” I said. It became our motto. Brevity and depth are friends, not enemies—think of the Gettysburg Address or any sonnet you learned at school. But most of us need time to refine a thought to its elements, and that’s a luxury television guests don’t usually get.

The impact, however, is greater than any other medium. Once, after a long interview with a wire service writer, which produced a delicately balanced and carefully researched story, I reflected that, while it would go to a thousand newspapers, the letters we’d get from two minutes on a television network would dwarf those from all those readers. Even on a dominant show like Oprah Winfrey’s, which I knew commanded the loyalty of millions of viewers, I’m

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