(image via news.harvard.com)
Presidential candidates rise, fall, achieve power and melt back into the population -- but Jim Lehrer, at the Presidential debates, is a constant. The anchor of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer seems almost a fixture at election time because he is a veteran of nearly a dozen Presidential debates. Lehrer embodies journalistic gravitas at the Presidential level.
One of the more interesting moments in the history of scripted television was The West Wing Presidential debates during November sweeps of their last season, in 2005. The episode, titled "The Debate," was written by Lawrence O'Donnell, who knows something about high politics (O'Donnell was Senior Advisor to the late, great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan). During the course of the live "debate," Senator Arnold Vinick -- played by Alan Alda -- challenges Congressman Matt Santos -- played by Jimmy Smits -- to break the tight debate format and just talk the issues.
Lawrence O'Donnell invited Jim Lehrer, who is the quintessential Presidential debates moderator, to play the role on the show. He told Kurt Anderson on NPR's Studio 360 about how Lehrer reacted to the storyline of Presidential candidates ditching the constraints of the debate rules:
"I tried to get Jim Lehrer to host (the debates). And there's this long silence at the other end of the phone. I thought he was going to tell me 'that's crazy Hollywood nonsense.' After this very long pause he says, 'you know I've been sitting there for years waiting for someone to do (that). He thought it was a great idea ... but he couldn't host the debate for us because PBS, where he works, has a rule against news personnel appearing on fictional content like that and Jim wrote the rule. So we didn't get Jim Lehrer, but we had a lot of fun doing it."
Veteran newser Forrest Sawyer was ultimately the moderator for the episode. CBS's "Public Eye" -- now defunct -- gathered some of the media criticism that the debate provoked at the time.
(image via washpo via AP Photo/NBC Universal, Mitchell Haddad)
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment