On Television

...On Television NOTHING WORTH REPORTING BY REUVEN FRANK ALTHOUGH it has been years since a national political convention produced any news the networks persist in covenng them This past August their reporters, who by conditioned reflex seek out news, roamed the vast floors m San Diego and Chicago buttonholing delegates for scraps that were usually trivial, often far-fetched, sometimes little more than mischief-making "Should Senator Dole announce his Cabinet before Election Day1" "Should Jesse Jackson have spoken in prime time'1" Print journalists, responding to the same reflex m desperation focused on the networks performance for news Thus, Nielsen ratings were prominent in the dispatches from both conventions We learned how the Democrats' audiences stacked up agamst the Republicans', how 1996's compared with 1992's (In case you've forgotten, the Democrats attracted bigger audiences than their rivals, by a hair The three networks combined drew barely 18 million viewers, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and C-SPAN together may have raised that figure by a third, but all told the audience was 30 to 50 per cent less than in 1992 Indeed, for the first time basic cable, the channels you do not pay premiums for, had a bigger audience than the three networks Their advertising salesmen immediately hit the road with their pocket calculators and portfolios ) After quickly exhausting such topics, the press went on to speculate about what the networks would do next time, in the year 2000 The consensus was that they might do nothing at all, leaving the field to public television and cable's all-news services Not, as you might think, because the networks are concerned that most of the public isn't watching anymore, but because conventions are now "packaged" and "scripted" by the parties to insure nothing worth reporting happens This year, in other words, everybody finally discovered what has been true for decades Choosing the candidates, the news TV coverage was built around, no longer takes place at the conventions In the ensuing discussion some seemed to assume the national conventions are held to enable the parties to present themselves and their candidates to the voters Paul Manafort, the California GOP political condottiere who ran the San Diego rally, said, "The purpose of the convention is to showcase Senator Dole in an issue context" Not only politicians but even journalists talked like that The inference was that news came when reporters looked behind the scripted facades, and that not letting them do so was the problem (In 1992, when nothing happened either, at least Pat Buchanan made a contioversial speech) Nobody recalled the conventions that provided real news of interest to the majority of Americans Perhaps even the middle-aged among the big shot politicians andjour-nahsts crowding San Diego and Chicago are too young to remember Since 1972, the picking of candidates has been done mainly through primaries, conventions have become rubber stamps Admittedly, they have produced some news over the past quarter-century, notably Senator Edward M Kennedy's bid to unseat Jimmy Carter, and the plot to make Gerald R Ford, a former President, Ronald Reagan's running mate It is conceivable, too, that one year no single candidate will emerge as the clear winner during the primaries and a nominee will have to be picked at the party gathering, but American politics makes this unlikely Conventions have existed since 1972 so they can be on television And television has carried them because it has not known how to stop From its beginning in 1948, commercial TV sent in enough equipment and personnel to create a temporary broadcasting headquarters at the conventions It not only covered the 1948 proceedings "gavel-to-gavel" but supplemented them with important reports on delegation meetings, press conferences and special programs "Gavel-to-gavel," never the rule for radio, became a TV boast, a slogan of pubhc-spiritedness and unselfish sacrifice It was, in fact, something less than that Two of the four then-existing networks were owned by TV set manufacturers eager to stimulate the sale of their products More important, the infant television industry wanted to please the politicians who regulated it Once committed to the effort, it also produced the maximum number of hours of programming possible so that costly New York studios could be shut down For that meant actors, musicians, stagehands, puppeteers, and other TV entertainers could be sent home, unpaid The first televised convention was by far the newsiest Half a dozen prominent Republicans contested the nomination of New York Governor Thomas E Dewey, and through one whole night the few who owned TV sets were tantalized by the shifting fortunes of a stop-Dewey movement At the Democratic convention, party leaders tried to find a candidate to oppose an unpopular sitting President, Harry S Tinman When they failed, the delegates took up other business while Truman was kept until past midnight in a cold, airless anteroom before being brought out to address the assembly That' other business," though, would set a partem for subsequent conventions Urged by the young Mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H Humphrey, to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk into the sunshine of human rights," the party made a revolutionary declaration of equality regardless of race This eventually destroyed the Democrats "Solid South" base, turning it into the heartland of GOP conservatism But already in 1948, viewers watched two state delegations walk out of the convention to form the splinter States' Rights Party that named South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond its standard bearer In 1952, General Dwight D Eisenhower challenged Senator Robert A Taft for the Republican nomination The struggle was waged behind closed doors as the credentials committee evaluated competing delegations from several states Television showed the closed doors —reporters were allowed in, but not cameras The angry reaction from home to that undemocratic symbol was enough to force the committee, dominated by Taft's people, to allow the seating of Eisenhower's delegations, thus ensuring his nommation Among the Democrats that year, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver won the most delegates in the primaries It was Illinois Governor Adlai E Stevenson, however, who got the nomination Six times following the advent of TV coverage the conventions pursued tins pattern of fighting it out over issues and the picking of candidates They held the attention of most Americans, and certainly most of the television audience Even though there were no second ballots after 1956—when Stevenson, nominated a second time, let the convention choose his running mate and Kefauver narrowly beat out Massachusetts Senator John F Kennedy—there was still a thrill when the roll call of the states began and that inevitable middle-aged Southern lady stepped up to the podium and sang out, "A-la-ba-ma " Furthermore, the conventions continued to be the theater of contention for civil rights and that other great American issue of the half-century, the war m Vietnam In 1964, President Lyndon B Johnson, with his nomination at the Atlantic City convention assured, was annoyed by the attention TV was giving to something called the Mississippi Free Democrats delegation, and to its leaders, Fanny Lou Hamer and Dr Aaron Henry Hamer told how she was beaten in a rural Mississippi jail for trying to vote in a party primary She broke up the lovefest dearly desired by Johnson, and her story registered indelibly with everyone watching It was news, it was interesting, it was important, it was a piece of history And no medium reported it as well as television In San Francisco, the same year, the Republicans unhorsed their Eastern Establishment to follow Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater into a new kind of American politics New York Governor Nelson A Rockefeller was shouted down in the platform committee and booed when he spoke to the convention Former President Eisenhower admonished his party not to heed the "commentators and colyumists" trying to divide it The assembly's answering roar shook the building Anchormen trembled in their booths lest the crowd come through the glass to get them Television news had become a popular villain ALL OF THIS ended when the Chicago police savaged antiwar demonstrators outside the Dem-ocrats' 1968 convention After that the Democrats turned the process of delegate selection over to the primaries, and the Republicans followed suit In 1972 there was still a war in Vietnam, and demonstrators showed up at both conventions, but no one remembers them As the Republicans renominated President Richard M Nixon, his convention managers fed out Cabinet members to the floor reporters The Secretary of the Interior went first to NBC, then to the other fw o networks, CBS got the Secretary of Labor first and so on There was nothing to ask them It has been that way ever since In August 1996, when the talk of not carrying the conventions began the Republican national chairman said the least the wealthy networks could do in return for their publicly-granted licenses was to carry the major parties for four hours each —which is what coverage had come to He literally echoed the appeal of a Democratic committeewoman back in 1984, when the networks cut down to three hours a night The argument is easily made that, for reasons of public policy, the commercial networks should carry at least some of what goes on—particularly the acceptance speeches and perhaps the nominating speeches But no one should pretend this is news The British press baron...

...Lord Norchffe, said, "News is what someone somewhere wants to suppress Everything else is advertising " That may be too harsh a template for a lot of day-to-day journalism, but it points up what the conventions have become There is nothing worth suppressing Consequently, there is no need for all those journalists, all that equipment, all that construction, all that expenditure For the Democrats' 1996 convention in Chicago, one network actually hired a world-renowned architect to design its anchor booth, and boasted about it in a press release In truth, I was much more exercised about the whole charade four years ago By then the transfer of all three of the old networks to new proprietors was complete, and efficiency and economy ruled, especially in news Foreign bureaus were closed, reporters and camera crews were fired, news coverage was hemmed in What outraged me was the spending of millions on what was not news millions that could have gone to reopening bureaus or rehiring reporters If the networks no longer cover as news the conventions of the years 2000 and beyond, will the savings be applied to improving news coverage9 What do you think...