In Cold Pursuit

/ As falling snow dusted his overcoat lapels, Tom Brokaw stood in windswept Geneva's -10 degrees C chill to anchor NBC's evening newscast. There was no clear journalistic reason for Brokaw's uncomfortable vigil. He was not interviewing anyone or waiting for a nearby event to happen. The floodlit tower clock behind him informed viewers only that he was not appearing live but on tape. Brokaw was, however, providing visible proof that NBC, like its network rivals, had spent a reported $500,000 to enable its analysts, dozens of support staffers and tons of equipment to hover near the big story of the day--even if that story was almost entirely nonvisual and the participants refused to talk to the press until it was over. Brokaw wryly implied to viewers that his intrepid-correspondent posture might be a bit silly: "You may be thinking that this is not the kind of weather in which you should be standing outside talking. You may be right."

Brokaw was far from alone in treating Geneva as a stage set. CBS's Dan Rather also anchored his show outdoors, and his colleague Bill Moyers recorded commentary while walking, vapor-breathed, past city sights. ABC Anchor Peter Jennings used a Soviet news briefing as dramatic background noise.

There was so little else to do. The few U.S. aides who ventured out of their suites into restaurants were mobbed by news-starved reporters. In all, 920 correspondents and technicians were accredited at the talks. Yet, as ABC Nightline Anchor Ted Koppel joked on air before the information lid was finally lifted, "it might be said that never have so many been sent to watch so few to learn so little."

The eventual agreement certainly was big news. But all that Rather, Brokaw and Jennings demonstrably gained by being on the scene was successive three- minute interviews with Secretary of State George Shultz, which could probably have been conducted via satellite from their studios in New York City. For NBC's Today Anchor Bryant Gumbel and ABC's Good Morning America Anchor David Hartman, who also moved their shows to Geneva, the rewards seemed even slimmer.

In contrast to the total U.S. contingent of nearly 400 news personnel, the Soviets sent just 20. And while an avalanche of advance stories in U.S. media built up hopes for a breakthrough, Moscow's Pravda noted the start of the talks in a terse, dry item on page 4. The agreement, however, became major Soviet news. Pravda even carried a rare photo, of Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.

/ For the more anticipatory American journalists, the problem was that nobody knew what was coming, and coverage was thus conspicuously full of "on the one hand this, on the other hand that." The one thing the reporters were sure of was that, in Brokaw's phrase, "No matter what the diplomats say, these talks are no small potatoes."