The Longest Week

For the television viewer more than the newspaper reader, the Democratic Convention was an acute attack of the blahs. TV's longest week was a forced seminar on the shortcomings of the medium and the medium's approach to the convention. It proved, if nothing else, that the printed word, when properly chosen, can be worth a thousand pictures from the tube.

Television was simply not the best reporter of what was essentially a business meeting. Ironically, it was the party reforms, many of them designed to make the convention less tedious to the home viewer, that took away the hoopla that in the past has made the proceedings colorful. Beyond that, the remarkable tight-lipped discipline of the delegates, old and young alike, robbed the cameras of the drama and the emotion they seek. The Chicago convention of 1968--a disaster in every other respect--could scarcely have provided a better script for a medium that thrives on fast movement and angry faces.

The networks covered this year's proceedings with the same dogged devotion they might have given Moses' discourse from the mountain. The cameras did not--could not--distinguish between the important and the trivial, and the formats, most of which were committed to unending live coverage, did not enable newsmen to sift out significance through editing. The start-to-finish, gavel-to-gavel coverage provided by CBS and NBC did offer immediacy. But this was a dubious advantage when the action on the floor was both slow and confusing and when the most interesting events took place during the small hours of the morning.

Given these limitations, the networks performed with technical competence. The only serious gaffe was made by CBS Anchorman Walter Cronkite, who was befuddled by the intricate McGovern strategy on the South Carolina credentials fight. He misinterpreted the vote as a serious danger to McGovern. NBC had not been clued in to McGovern's South Carolina tactics either, but at least avoided the mistake of seeing a threat to his chances.

NBC's floor correspondents, a new but energetic crew, regularly beat CBS's battle-scarred veterans to good sources. Sent to interview Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, CBS's John Hart found NBC's Douglas Kiker ahead of him --and genially admitted it. "Let's see if we can listen in," he told Cronkite, who, all alone in his aerie above the floor, did not seem amused. Even CBS'S Eric Sevareid, who usually leavens his pomposity with real insight, seemed somewhat confounded. Talking of the problems McGovern would have bringing the party together, he judged that "you can't make a winning omelet without knocking some eggheads." Ouch.

NBC's Today show matched William

Buckley against John Kenneth Galbraith, hoping to emulate ABC's famous confrontation between Buckley and Gore Vidal in 1968. But it overlooked the fact that Buckley and Galbraith are good friends who put aside their verbal darts when with each other and use conversational shuttlecocks instead. Galbraith was a delegate from Massachusetts and usually half-exhausted from the night's deliberations. "I was up until about 5 o'clock," he complained after one of Buckley's well-rounded profundities, "and I can't come up with anything as complicated as that."

ABC differed from the other networks in starting its coverage at 9:30 p.m. rather than 7 o'clock and sometimes signing off before the final gavel. Its coverage was generally good, and Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner may have been the most informative anchormen in the hall. Still, ABC lacked the boldness to depart significantly from the patterns set by its more prestigious rivals. Its shorter programs had an unavoidable cut-rate air about them, largely because they represented mere random samplings and not what was sorely needed on all fronts: intelligent distillations.

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