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Myth Boxes
Is It Real or Is It Tape?
A few days after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles the then vice president, Dan Quayle, delivered an address in which he blamed the riots on what he called the "poverty of values" in American society. Warming to the subject, the vice president punctuated his support of "familyvalues" and his attack on what he called the "cultural elite" by alluding to a popular television sitcom. "It doesn't help matters," he declared, "when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice."
Because the vice president had sounded these themes many times, the substance of the speech was not by journalistic standards particularly newsworthy. The reference to Murphy Brown, however, generated a frenzy of news coverage. By using the Murphy Brown show as an example,the vice president attempted to link Hollywood (one of the sources of what he called the "cultural elite") to a decline in traditional values.Moreover, because the Murphy Brown character is a reporter, the vice president was also generally viewed as assailing real reporters, another element he frequently identified as part of the "cultural elite."
Whatever his intentions, the vice president's attack on a fictional character in a sitcom known for its frequent allusions to real people set off a bizarre chain of events in which reality and fiction became blurred. Shortly after the vice president's speech, the producers of Murphy Brown responded by dedicating the show's Emmy award to all single parents and intoning to them, "Don't let anybody tell you you're not a family." But the Emmy award was only the first shot.
As the new television season approached, rumors that the fictional character would reply to the vice president abounded. The only unknown was how Murphy would respond. Attempting to deflect the coming attack,the vice president, on the morning before the broadcast, sent a stuffed elephant to Murphy Brown's fictional baby. Accompanying the elephant was a handwritten note in which the vice president promised that he and President Bush would work to assure prosperity for all children. The show's producers publicly thanked the vice president but announced that they were sending the gift to a real child.
When the long-awaited show finally aired, it began with Murphy trying to quiet her crying baby while watching Quayle attack her. "I'm glamorizing single motherhood?" she screams at the televised image of the vice president. "What planet is he on?" Thus the vice president was reduced to a fictional character embedded in video. Meanwhile, Murphy's newsroom colleagues are seen reading copies of the New York Daily News (a real newspaper) with its prominent headline, "DAN QUAYLE TO MURPHY BROWN: YOU TRAMP." (Blurring the distinction between fact and fiction even more, the following day's New York Daily News ran a photograph of the cast holding up the newspaper headline.) Finally, the show closed with Murphy Brown on the set of "FYI" (the show within theshow) delivering a strong rebuke to the vice president and urging him to recognize that "families come in all shapes and sizes."
Quayle tried to deflect the criticism by inviting the press to watch him watching the show. Surrounded by a multicultural mix of singlemothers, Quayle demonstrated good humor as the episode unfolded, but it was to little avail. The vice president had become a fictional character. The distinction between reality and fiction erased, the vice president resembled the private investigator in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—a real person defined by a fictional world.
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