Do Conventions Turn Off the Public?

By Richard Zoglin

The heat was thick outside Atlanta's Omni Coliseum, but the nostalgia inside was even thicker. John F. Kennedy Jr. stirred memories of Camelot as he introduced Uncle Ted on Tuesday night. Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, those old TV warriors, were back in the CBS anchor booth. And network reporters, heads cocked into their earphones, mikes at the ready, were trolling the floor for stories as if it all still meant something.

No one, least of all the network commentators, could ignore the fact that the 1988 Democratic National Convention was a made-for-TV event. Virtually everything was geared for the TV coverage, from the size of the hall (too small for all the participants to get inside, but just right for the TV cameras) to the careful management of the schedule to ensure that key events took place in prime time. That left network journalists in a quandary. Back in the days when political conventions actually used to conduct business, debate issues and select candidates, saturation coverage had value -- if only, as network executives liked to point out, as a quadrennial civics lesson. Now that they have become four-night campaign commercials, the lesson being taught is not so much civics as show business.

The result is that last week some network news chiefs were re-examining whether such events ought to be subjected to the full-blown assault that TV has traditionally given them. Even before the Democratic Convention was over, ABC News President Roone Arledge suggested that Democrats and Republicans, perhaps in concert with the networks, ought to change the present setup and "come up with something more appealing." Observed Arledge: "The political parties are turning off the American public."

This year the networks had already significantly scaled back their convention forces. ABC, NBC and CBS each sent between 325 and 450 staffers to Atlanta, an overall reduction of about one-third from the manpower deployed in 1984. Those pared-down troops still produced about the same amount of airtime as four years ago (coverage both years began at 9 EDT on most nights), indicating that the excess personnel had been mostly fat. "Production shortcuts have made our lives a little more difficult," acknowledged NBC Executive Producer Joe Angotti, "but in terms of what the viewer sees at home, the cuts make no difference whatsoever."

The networks this year had to face another fact of TV life that is becoming increasingly apparent: they are no longer the only game in town. The gavel-to- gavel duties have largely been taken over by Ted Turner's Cable News Network and C-SPAN, the cable public-affairs channel. Operating on its home turf, CNN had a force of some 300 at the convention, up from 275 in '84, and proved to be a fully muscled competitor to the Big Three. Meanwhile, the convention floor was teeming with local-station crews searching for the hometown angle and conveying a bit of the bustle to the folks back in Sioux Falls or Sacramento. Many of them did so with the help of independent services like Conus Communications and Potomac Communications, which provided work space, technical facilities and satellite time at a typical cost of between $4,000 and $8,000 for the week. "Seldom," said CBS Anchorman Dan Rather, "have so many with so much covered so little."

For the networks, the trick was to avoid being seen as passive conduits for the Democrats' well-oiled public relations show. "We're in the news business, not the propaganda business," said Lane Venardos, CBS executive producer for special events. There were small shows of independence throughout the week. All three broadcast networks cut away from Monday's opening-night festivities before the elaborate finale, a rendition of America the Beautiful by Trumpeter-Vocalist Phil Driscoll. A biographical film prepared for Jimmy Carter's appearance was ignored by all three, and CBS opted not to show the music-video profile that preceded Jesse Jackson's speech. "It was a straight- out political film," said Rather. "If they want this kind of stuff on TV, they should buy time." NBC took perhaps the most radical approach, cutting away from the convention activity at several points for "mini-debates" on major issues like drugs and crime. The aim, in the words of NBC's overheated publicity material, was to "take down the walls of the political conventions and open them up to the American people through television." The ploy, however, proved to be more distracting than illuminating.

Even Jackson's rousing speech Tuesday night seemed to play better on TV than in the hall. The cameras heightened its impact by showing Jackson's face in evocative close-up and by cutting frequently to tear-stained delegates in the audience. Many home viewers were probably taken aback when ABC Correspondent Brit Hume, sizing up the more general reaction on the convention floor, noted that the speech "didn't get the kind of deeply emotional response that he's accustomed to."

Next to the Dukakis-Jackson rapprochement, the most closely watched reconciliation at the convention was that between CBS's Rather and Cronkite. Relations between the two, according to published accounts, have been tense ever since Rather replaced Cronkite as CBS Evening News anchorman in 1981. Rather reportedly resisted giving Cronkite a major role at the 1984 conventions, and Cronkite has criticized Rather for such transgressions as his much publicized Evening News walk-off last September. Overcompensating as usual, Rather treated Cronkite with an excess of deference ("We love having you and love being with you") and a minimum of editing. Cronkite's windy comments proved once again that ex-anchormen never die, they just become bad commentators (see also: NBC's John Chancellor and ABC's David Brinkley).

Elsewhere in the network skybooths, NBC's Tom Brokaw offered the largest load of convention tidbits (former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox offered to pay $1,000 a minute for a chance to speak) and the most comfortably authoritative manner. Brinkley, meanwhile, seemed an increasingly surly companion for Anchor Peter Jennings. Musing on the significance of the Jackson phenomenon, Brinkley posed this startling question to Commentators Hodding Carter and George Will: "Is it all over for white males?"

All three networks also had the ratings to worry about. The Nielsens showed a substantial drop in convention viewership compared with 1984 -- down by 17% on Monday night, 14% on Wednesday. For most of the week, well under 50% of the viewing audience was tuned in. That more than anything else may be what has network news executives questioning whether saturation convention coverage, like floor fights and multiple ballots, is a relic of the past.

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta and William Tynan/Atlanta