The Last Media Circus

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

If last week's summit between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev symbolized the end of the cold war, it may also have marked the end of a rather less historic phenomenon: the Great International Media Circus, with its Tibet-size press rooms wired for every conceivable form of human communication; "photo ops" in which a couple of dozen photographers viciously compete to see who can take the same picture the most times; legions of bored, humiliated reporters wandering aimlessly about with the glazed eyes of the living dead; and assorted bearers, runners and factotums, each armed with a walkie-talkie in order to remain, Sununu-like, in a state of "constant communication" ("Base to Smith, Bush is moving, Bush is moving!"). Last week's summit had all this, plus near riots in the press room whenever White House aides distributed another meaningless pool report (sample title: "Mrs. Bush Pool Report A").

Why is the circus folding its tent? Economics. Pan American World Airways, from which the White House charters the press plane, is under bankruptcy proceedings and is in the process of selling its assets. If Pan Am goes under, no other airline appears both willing and able to replace it as the official purveyor of 747s to the press corps. "No other airline wants to do it," says Gary Wright of the White House Travel Office. "The bottom line is the airlines don't make enough money out of it, and the p.r. value is negligible."

Then there are the financial realities of modern journalism. Monstrous as the Moscow extravaganza was -- the TV networks couldn't resist sending their anchors, and CBS dispatched seven camera crews -- many news executives have concluded that they can no longer afford saturation coverage of all presidential trips. (The overall cost of just the press centers in Moscow and Kiev was $250,000.) The Associated Press sent 11 staff members on the trip, a third less than the number that covered the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in 1988.

Since the coldest days of the cold war, summit coverage has been a growth industry. But it has ballooned to such mammoth proportions that it has crossed into the realm of self-parody. Only a relative handful of the 2,113 journalists accredited to cover the Bush-Gorbachev meetings managed to lay eyes on any of the leaders' key aides, much less Bush or Gorbachev. Some White House regulars were assigned to pools, but most journalists "covered" the events by sitting in the press room at Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel, a mile and a half from the Kremlin. There they read pool reports, watched CNN on projection TV screens, spoke mainly to one another and were given a single diplobabble briefing by the two press spokesmen, Marlin Fitzwater and Vitali Ignatenko.

The absurdity of all this was highlighted Tuesday night when a White House aide announced that the pool assigned to cover Bush's visit to Gorbachev's suburban residence was not expected to provide any coverage. "You'll just go up there and hang out," the aide advised.

Observed a Moscow-based correspondent: "Coverage like this has become a giant fraud -- everybody pretending and writing as if they actually saw something. It's really just institutionalized plagiarism."