The Electronic Olympics

There were Republicans there, too, but they were a minority. Specifically, the ratio was 7 to 10. The assembled G.O.P. delegates at the San Francisco convention numbered 1,308. The personnel sent by the television networks to cover the event numbered 1,825.

They covered it all right--so expansively and so expensively that it might seem picayune even to consider the mistakes they inadvertently committed along the way. But it must be understood that political conventions are the intramural Olympics of television. The networks' panoply of glimpsed emotions, analyses, quips and radioactive poop are the team points they are scoring in their decathlons with one another to see who is best. Since they are spending $25 million on political coverage this year to find out, they probably deserve the judgments they seek.

The Bird Dogs. By a hair, NBC was best, at least at the half, with the Democratic Convention still to be played. NBC owes its victory--confirmed by last week's ratings, which gave NBC a bigger share of the audience than CBS and ABC combined--to the fine and tireless work of its bird-dog reporters. Chasing candidates in hotels and delegates on the floor, walkie-talkers like John Chancellor, Edwin Newman, Frank McGee, Bob Teague and Sander Vanocur always seemed to be in the most interesting places at the most interesting times, in moments of import as well as absurdity.

Two and a half hours before the ballot, Vanocur accosted Scranton's floor manager, Pennsylvania's Senator Hugh Scott, and extracted from him remarks that were an almost overt admission that Scranton had already conceded defeat. Though reporters and delegates on the spot may have known it, the TV audience across the country did not--getting in addition a little episode of ineptitude on the part of Scott. Chancellor, on the other hand, made capital amusement out of his own arrest. Led out of the hall by a sergeant at arms for refusing to clear an aisle, he kept yattering into his walkie-talkie, assuring NBC's listeners that others would carry on in his absence, proclaiming his arrest an undignified disgrace, and signing off with "This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody."

Pretzeled David. Even though their act is pretty much played out, NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley still managed to be more diverting and amusing than the other so-called anchor men. Brinkley pretzels himself in an attempt to give the impression that he is doing his best to contain most of his natural wit, when actually he is straining to be funny. His best effort last week was his description of Illinois' Everett Dirksen as "a Shakespearean actor manque.'"

NBC's newsmen produced one ten-pound peccadillo, and it came in the twelve-minute interlude between Senator Goldwater's acceptance speech and the formal end of the convention. Huntley said: "Senator Keating of New York seems to be leading the entire New York delegation in departing from the convention hall." CBS, at the same time, was accurately reporting the uneventful and orderly breakup of the crowd. Back on NBC, David Brinkley went on: "Three-fourths of the New York delegation has walked out." Outside the hall, Sander Vanocur then explained that Keating may have been miffed by Goldwater's line about " 'excess being no vice' "--misquoting Goldwater and misrepresenting Keating. Keating's press secretary later reported that the Senator was "stunned" at all this. He merely left when the speech was over, hoping to beat most of the crowd, which he did.

Character Sketches. Despite the ratings, the qualitative difference between NBC and CBS was actually quite slight. The convention, after all, was fully and exhaustively visible on all three networks. In the anchor booth, CBS tried a new vertical arrangement in contrast to the horizontal give-and-take of Huntley and Brinkley. CBS's congenial Walter Cronkite carried all the burden of coordinating CBS's coverage, while Eric Sevareid would appear every so often as a kind of deus ex machina and deliver auroral analyses uninhibited by routine details, or a shaft of wit, as when he recalled H. L. Mencken's description of a convention orator as coming from "a home for extinct volcanoes."

CBS was also best in coming up with offbeat sidebars, finding good material in unobvious quarters. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, for example, put in some fine moments on CBS sketching the faces of Goldwater and Scranton, making comments on the characters of each as he felt them coming up through his pencil. He showed how Goldwater's glasses make him look better, whereas glasses on Scranton "kill him dead, make him look like an English teacher." CBS also scored what amounted to a news beat when Cronkite was the first to get Governor Scranton to say that he had not read his catastrophic letter before it was sent to Goldwater.

By Turtle. ABC announced the same revelation an hour later, and that fairly well suggests the quality of ABC's coverage of the convention. Viewers who stayed with ABC long enough would sooner or later find out all that was important, but the breaking news apparently was sent by box turtle to ABC Anchor Men Howard Smith and Edward Morgan. Yet ABC is attempting for the first time to compete at par with the other two networks, is spending $7,000,000 on its election coverage, including $50,000 for the services of Dwight D. Eisenhower as an exclusive ABC commentator.

Ike should never have accepted. He was too much a figure in the convention--at least a potential one--to be a paid hand of a TV network. ABC got little for its $50,000, as Ike put in his duty time saying nothing and saying it gently, in conversation with his exPress Secretary James Hagerty, who is now an ABC vice president.

Despite their energetic coverage, the general role of the networks at political conventions has in some ways become disturbing. Whereas they once moved in and televised conventions like any other major news event (1948, 1952), they have now become so much a part of the scene and a source of the show that they are really participating as well as reporting. They cover the convention and they cover themselves too.

Often they show little respect for the politicians who are supposed to be the central figures of the meeting. While Everett Dirksen was nominating Barry Goldwater, both Cronkite and Huntley interspersed their own voices, passing comments and judgments on what Dirksen was saying, not giving the man a chance to deliver his speech as a whole. The networks often cut away from speeches in midsentence, or ignored them altogether, on the assumption that their own material was more interesting than what they had come to cover.

Hopeful BB. The networks have also to a considerable extent shut out the great ground-swelling noises of the convention hall. Sound is half the atmosphere there, and it is thick enough to cut, but TV merely cuts it off or down, protecting its commentators but depriving TV audiences of the convention's overbearing sense of commotion.* When Governor Rockefeller was loudly booed as he spoke last week, the booing was almost imperceptible.

The networks apparently see no difference between coverage of a convention and an election. In November, all they have to deal with is an incoming tumble of numbers, and the analytical function of the anchor men is central. They are the center of the stage. Unfortunately, they arrogate to themselves the same importance at conventions, upstaging the assembled party.

At earlier conventions, mobile crews brilliantly covered corridor intrigues and kingmaking sessions in sequestered hotel rooms; but it had long been obvious that there would be none of that this year. The most important aspect of the convention last week was missed almost completely by the networks. Spending all their time fussing over the latest developments among the sorry pack of obvious also-rans, they made no real attempt to concentrate on the man who had the nomination sewed up from the start. The TV coverage before the first ballot was largely focused on Scranton, who was clearly firing a BB at a battleship. Goldwater himself was unavailable, but the networks' roving floor reporters should have spent at least half their time talking to the swarming delegates who had come to nominate him, having them explain in their own terms why they were resolved to do it.

*For those who wondered why NBC did not seize this opportunity to broadcast the proceedings in color, the answer is, sadly, that the color technology is not yet up to it. Hand-held color cameras are not yet manufactured. Except for special spots, like the rostrum itself, lighting is not adequate for color in such a big hall. And NBC executives decided that occasional shots of color interspersed between the black and white would be more confusing than desirable.

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