TV's Condescending Coverage

By Thomas Griffith

The television networks are approaching next week's Republican Convention in Dallas wishing they did not have to spend so much money on it and knowing in advance the audience will be disappointingly small. Once again the three major networks will limit their coverage to two hours a night. You might think they would at least use those two hours to show the actual convention. Not so. This will not be Tosca; it will be Dan Rather Brings You Excerpts from Tosca.

The arrogance of television is its assumption that its own maunderings are more interesting than what is being said on the platform --that you would rather hear Rather speak smugly, as he did in San Francisco, of the "pitter-patter of platitudes" than hear the hoarse Irish oratory of Speaker Tip O'Neill, which CBS did not carry. Networks cover tennis matches with more fidelity to the action.

In Dallas, the networks are expected to block out time to carry the full speeches of the President, the Vice President and the keynoter, but the rest of the time viewers will be on their own. Those seriously interested in the actual goings-on will be scanted unless they can find the full thing on cable.

Television's habit of cutting away at will from the podium began, with far more justification, in the days when conventions were a gaudy and contentious rite where delegates really debated and decided. Television boasted of the civic responsibility of its gavel-to-gavel coverage, but even then it was contrasting the shouting orator and the snoozing delegate or chasing politicians down hotel corridors, arguing that this was where the real news was being made. It was also where journalistic reputations were being made, which is why in its own interest each network lavished so much money on coverage. Such journalistic triumphs are no longer possible now that conventions have become bland commercial pageants designed to market a candidate known in advance. Jeff Gralnick, in charge of ABC's operation, calls conventions "dinosaurs."

The networks are spending about $15 million apiece on their 1984 convention coverage and feeling abused. Though the Republicans and Democrats all but turn over their halls to television, the political parties do try to deny it one wish: television wants controversy; the parties aim for tranquillity. You can expect to see in Dallas, as in San Francisco, cameras diverted from the podium to watch the networks' high-priced news performers, wearing Mickey Mouse headsets and pushing through crowds, foraging forlornly for nonnews. At the convention's transcending moments, the big speeches, television is at its best. In San Francisco, these speeches were endlessly ballyhooed in advance in the irritating way television plugs prizefights or sitcoms to come. But if this iteration helped swell the crowd to hear the oratory of Governor Cuomo, Jesse Jackson or Fritz Mondale, much can be forgiven. These fine speeches reminded us that a skilled orator, adjusting intuitively to the crowd's response, employs a different and more demanding art than the numbing nattering of commentators. Television talk has been memorably defined by ABC's Sam Donaldson: "You get the mouth working and hope the mind will follow."

A disproportionate amount of forgettable words at Moscone Center last month came not from politicians but from anchormen and their in-house pundits, whose views were already wearily familiar. (Among anchormen only David Brinkley with his wry sanity brought any verbal distinction.) Politicians can be corny, boring or strident, but sometimes wholehearted, amusing or touching. They are an authentic, unpredictable slice of American life. Much of the time the networks preferred to substitute a filter of detached, bloodless and often disdainful commentary by their own people.

At the next conventions in four years, network executives are eager to lay down the burden of being the first with the most public service. They will probably take a cue from the Olympic coverage, going live for major events, but instead of filling the rest of the time with their own chatter, offering up taped portions of the day's earlier sessions. In this way the networks should be able to operate more modestly, while more faithfully recording the occasion they set out to cover.