The Viewers' Choice

Covering a political convention is like melting down a sperm whale in a 21-in.

try-pot. There is just too much blubber.

Newswriters can keep their chins in their hands and their copy under control. But television, which is at its most exciting when it shows an event as it happens, is also hopelessly chained to that event, in all its unfolding sprawl and confusion.

Last week NBC met the problem more effectively than it has ever been met in the past, by applying the light wit and dry satire of David Brinkley, in easy converse with the world's most informed straight man, Chet Huntley.

CBS once had its own answer to the problem and called it Ed Murrow. During long, dull stretches, Murrow and any number of imitators would deliver what amounted to a Politics I course as taught at Delphi. But last week most of the students cut the course. Eyes raking remote high 'corners at the broadcasting booth, head cocked into a single earphone, Murrow gave the impression that he was listening more to the rulings of the Supreme Chairman than to the conversation of his fluent, competent colleague, Walter Cronkite. Murrow is still television's big news name; but his doom-edged, oracular school of reporting--better suited to war and disaster than to the gaudier side of U.S. politics--was rendered obsolete by the fresh wind from NBC.

Halfway with L.BJ. "This is the convention, and there are those who love it," said Brinkley with wry detachment on opening day, setting the tone for NBC's coverage all the way. Spotting Zsa Zsa Gabor with Louisiana's deLesseps Morrison, he observed that Morrison "has just been defeated for Governor so he's got a lot of spare time now." When Lyndon Johnson accepted the vice-presidential nomination, Brinkley suggested that the slogan "All the way with L.B.J." should now read "Half the way with L.B.J." Cooped up in a loft. by 12-ft. glassed-in booth that looked as cramped as the cabin of a spaceship, Huntley and Brinkley muffled all organ tones, were obviously so complementary a pair--Brinkley the aperitif, Huntley the cordial--that neither could have done so well alone. They relaxed and let history write itself: while the CBS team hinted at a panic slide away from Kennedy, H. & B. refused to make artificial excitement of what their calculations told them was artificial news.

One of their few slips: a dissertation on the demise of bossism, delivered just after John Kennedy was nominated with the help of the biggest political bosses to be found in the U.S.

Back-Door Coverage. On H. & B.'s performance alone, NBC scored a clear beat over CBS and ABC, which slid along on the scented oils of John C. Daly; but NBC also pretty much outdid the other networks in overall reporting and picture coverage. CBS jumped around nervously, interviewing its own floor men, picking up remote shots of delegates until viewers expected to see the screen dissolve into a creepee-peepee interview with a delegate who had got lost in a Pasadena supermarket. NBC had its own dogged, creepee-peeping reporters on the floor--notably Martin Agronsky, Sander Vanocur, Herb Kaplow, Merrill Mueller, Frank McGee--but they never kept NBC from staying close to the main flow of developments.

Among the networks, there was much internecine crowing about scoops. CBS thought it made history by its coverage of the Kennedy auto cavalcade, with shots of young Jack's fingers tapping on the dash board. NBC proudly claimed that it got the best shots of Kennedy leaving his hideaway cottage after being nominated (ABC was there, lenses akimbo, but its cameramen somehow followed a phony tip and were crouched in waiting by the back door, which never opened). Actually, little newsbeats here and there were not what mattered. More than the others, it was NBC that held the steadiest eye on the center of the story.

The Last Mile. Whatever the merits of TV's coverage, some observers felt that, good or bad, it hurt the convention, that the whole show was too heavily rigged for TV effects. BBC Correspondent Robin Day, pointing out that TV cameras are forced to the back of the rbom in British conventions, said he thought the cameras injure the freedom of the U.S. press, killing off "the valid idea of off-the-record remarks," as politicians eagerly seek TV exposure and then produce floods of "blather and gobbledygook."

After the last mile of speeches had finally paid out through the rostrum's idiot box, ratings indicated that nearly twice as many people had watched NBC as CBS, with ABC far out of the running. CBS, on the defensive in its long-held top position in TV news, had at least one slim consolation: it scored an exclusive interview with the expectant Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy on a Cape Cod lawn 3,000 miles from the gavel.

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