Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image Making.

• Author: Schieffer, Bob

Andre Agassi, the young tennis pro who wears hideous day-glo colors Land plays with his shirttail out, has been starting recently in a television commercial for Canon cameras in which--nicely cleaned up and hair combed--he declares that in today's world, "Image is everything."

Now comes Kiku Adatto, who is not your average day-glo, shirttail-out kind of person, to declare that Agassi is probably right. And, more important, Americans and their politics are the worse for it.

Adatto's name won't ring any bells with American politicians or voters--she has been a lecturer at Harvard and studies American culture--but around television newsrooms she is known as the "Sound Bite Lady." It was Adatto who set network news on its collective ear when she sat down with a stopwatch and timed just how long presidential candidates were allowed to speak on evening news broadcasts during the 1988 campaign.

Her findings startled political scientists and other assorted observers, delighted a lot of television's print competitors, and, frankly, embarrassed many of us who were responsible for that year's campaign coverage. Adatto discovered that the average sound bite for candidates in 1988 was only 9.8 seconds, compared to an average of 42 seconds in 1968. At no time during the entire Bush-Dukakis campaign, which came when the Cold War was ending, when America had been plunged into record debt, and when our cities were overrun with crime and poverty, did a candidate for president speak uninterrupted for as long as a minute in any story broadcast on any network evening news program. Television reporters and producers had become so obsessed with pretty pictures from the campaign trail, Adatto observed, that they had little time left to report on what the campaign was about or even what the candidates were saying. In Picture Perfect, she goes beyond her original study and shows how television's obsession with pictures is part of a much larger problem--modem American culture's fascination with visual images, real and manufactured.

Adatto's new work is sometimes a frightening reminder of how easily we can be influenced by the images generated by advertising, still photography, and the movies; but, to me, her most pertinent observations are still about television campaign coverage.

Armed with her original findings and buttressed with scores of interviews with reporters, consultants, and strategists, Adatto concludes that viewers have become so accustomed to picture-driven campaign coverage that even when they know that the "reality" on the screen has been staged, they can...