SPECULATION TOPS SUMMIT SUBJECTS

All dolled up with no place to go.

That’s what the networks were after the news blackout during this week’s Geneva summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Because of the Geneva time difference, the burden of coverage fell mostly on the network morning shows. Reinforced by the usual throng experts, they had already talked their guts out speculating about what was coming in Geneva, spewing a crescendo of verbiage leading to the actual meeting between the two leaders.

More and more, though, TV news is getting to resemble the ponderous super powers it covers. Once a course has been set and the motor revved up, it’s hard to turn back.

So there they were on Tuesday, hundreds and hundreds of TV people already in place, thousands and thousands of words already spoken and millions and millions of dollars already spent for a Maginot Line of media irreversibly committed to a story that wasn’t happening. What to do? Simple.

Speculate some more.

Then, after the summit ended with no one seeming to know what really had been achieved, the speculators resurfaced Thursday morning to speculate about their speculations and about post-summit events for which they undoubtedly will be recalled to speculate again.

To put it charitably, Geneva coverage produced more nuance than news.

In the category of really, realllly, reallllllly stretching, there was Jane Pauley on NBC’s “Today,” commenting from New York on pictures of Reagan greeting Gorbachev for their first meeting and nudging Gorbachev into the building.

“Isn’t it interesting,” Pauley noted, “how the President subtly seems to be directing.” Interesting, perhaps, if you also find peeling paint interesting.

What was really interesting--and revealing--was 24-hour Cable News Network’s live coverage of briefings that White House spokesman Larry Speakes gave for the press in Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel. Given the blackout, the focus was on semantics, mechanics and form.

Speakes informed reporters late Wednesday that the room in which Reagan and Gorbachev met over lunch had walls covered with green silk. He said the furniture was brown. He said the two men had finger sandwiches. He said that they not only sat, but also stood. Yippee.

Speakes was asked to define “content” versus “substantive agreement.” Were the issues substantive or did the two men talk substantively about minor issues?

And what about the reported report that was to follow the summit? “Within the context of the report are different subjects and within the subjects are different issues,” Speakes explained.

Did the two leaders agree to meet again or did they agree that they should meet again to agree to meet again? “They may, in their agreement, agree to meet tomorrow,” Speakes said.

No wonder even some of the anchors sometimes sounded confused. “For the moment I’m Bernard Shaw in Geneva,” said CNN’s Bernard Shaw in Geneva.

Were viewers also confused? With the pollution of words, focus on trivia, unsubstantiated rumors (“I really must stress, this is really tea leaves,” Dan Rather said one morning on CBS) and conflicting reports, how could they not be?

NBC’s Marvin Kalb reported on “Today” that Reagan’s advisers feared that the President would look bad beside Gorbachev if there were a joint post-summit appearance by the two leaders. A few minutes later, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Today” that Reagan’s advisers would be “terribly disappointed” if there were no joint appearance.

There was a preoccupation with “grading” Reagan and Gorbachev like students. And when they ran low on the Kremlin Americanologists and American Kremlinologists, reporters interviewed themselves.

At one point on “The CBS Morning News,” Maria Shriver in New York interviewed her co-anchor Forrest Sawyer in Geneva about the infamous “Casper Weinberger letter.” Shortly after that, Sawyer interviewed Rather about the same letter.

In fact, Sawyer’s reverential interviews with CBS Geneva man Rather were a regular feature of “The CBS Morning News.” “Thank you for joining us, sir,” Sawyer said following one of those sessions.

When there were no more experts or journalists to interview, the networks really got silly. Sawyer and David Hartman on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” for example, came through with interviews of Ronald Reagan. . . . Jr.

The President’s son dropped in on his father while in Geneva on assignment for Playboy magazine. And then he was invited to drop in on the morning shows. Sawyer asked him for a “sense of the man” and the President’s mood. “I wished him luck and said, ‘Go, get ‘em,’ and he said, ‘Of course,’ or something like that,” Ron Jr. reported. Hohhhhhhhkay.

And then on Thursday morning, Hartman asked Ron Jr. for some new scoop on “the whole process” of the summit talks, only to learn that Ron Jr. was scoopless.

That was nothing, though, for when the chips were down, “Today” brought in its own secret weapon, weatherman Willard Scott in New York. On Tuesday morning, a befuddled-looking Bryant Gumbel in Geneva briefly shared a split screen with weatherman Willardman, who was all dressed up like Boy George on behalf of a charity, with the blessing of NBC News President Lawrence Grossman.

“Hey, this is Boy Gorbachev. Don’t you know who I am?” announced Willard, who proceeded to give his weather report in drag, just as he did a couple of years ago attired as Carmen Miranda. So much for summit sanity.

The real Boy Gorbachev, meanwhile, was behind closed doors with Ronald Reagan, causing continuous media speculation about what they were up to. “Wait until tomorrow,” expert Soviet watcher Richard Pipes wisely advised on “Today” Wednesday. “Your audience will know tomorrow.”

No way, though, for wild conjecture was the order of the week as the networks continued to make thunder from small sparks. Leave it to Bill Moyers, though, to provide the cautionary last word about an event that needed to be placed in context.

“When you’re 50, as I am, you will have seen 11 of these summits, as I have,” he told Sawyer on CBS. And Moyers added: “The world is no more safer today than it was then.”