ALL MEDIA EYES ON U.S. VISIT OF THE POPE : Networks Pulling Out All Stops for His Sept. 10 Arrival

The big day in Miami is Sept. 10. There have been requests for at least 3,700 press credentials--including requests from the networks--to cover the first event, the ensuing tour, or both.

Could this be a Beatles reunion? A Sean Penn fight? Another try at Harmonic Convergence? The comeback of Spinal Tap? Not quite.

Sept. 10 is when Pope John Paul II is scheduled to arrive in Miami to start his 10-day, eight-city tour of the United States, including stops on Sept. 15-16 in Los Angeles. The trip is his second to this country. The first was a seven-day, six-city visit in October, 1979.

It’s a historic occasion--and now, as then, as much a television happening as a religious one. Consider:

“CBS Morning News,” “CBS Evening News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight” will originate from Miami on Sept. 10-11, reporting from there on the papal visit and its significance for Catholics in America.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” will stay here, but has a theological “special correspondent”--the Rev. Andrew Greeley, the novelist-priest from Chicago best known for novels that some critics call “steamy,” among them “Ascent Into Hell”--the tale of a priest who falls in love with a nun, gets her pregnant and leaves the priesthood to marry her.

NBC, which initially said its “Today” show and “NBC Nightly News” would stay home, may be reconsidering. “Our plans are still being worked out,” NBC News President Larry Grossman says, mysteriously adding: “There are a couple of things in the works that I am just not free to talk about at this point. They may really be extraordinary, and part of it will depend on whether they work out.”

Public TV’s “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” is taking a somewhat more modest approach to its papal reportage. It won’t move the program to Miami. But it will report on the arrival and the tour. And, as a spokeswoman quotes executive producer Les Crystal as saying, “We will be doing appropriate analysis and discussion when they are called for.”

In addition to regular reports from staffers accompanying him on his U.S. tour, all three networks and Cable News Network plan live coverage of the Pope’s scheduled 11 a.m PDT arrival in Miami.

The Big Three also will air one-hour prime-time specials, the first to be broadcast Tuesday, NBC’s provocatively entitled “God Is Not Elected.”

In it, Maria Shriver and others report on issues--including divorce, homosexuality, abortion and birth control--that the Pope faces with Catholics in four cities on his tour, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Starting Aug. 31, ABC will begin a five-part Catholic-issues series as part its “World News Tonight” broadcasts. ABC and CBS also will engage in sort of a battle of ecclesiastical specials on the same night the next week.

At 9 p.m. PDT on Sept. 10, ABC will air a one-hour program anchored by Peter Jennings, “The Pope in America,” with CBS airing its “The American Catholic” special, anchored by Dan Rather, an hour later.

Granted, it’s not every day that a Pope comes calling. But why all this coverage and reportage?

“Obviously, a trip like this by the Pope is an enormously important event,” says NBC’s Grossman. “He never has traveled so extensively in this country . . . so what we’re trying to do is assess what news will be made, what major issues will be focused on (in the papal trip).

“I think we’re all sensitive to so-called overcoverage. But on the other hand, it’s a very big story, no question about it.”

However, says Richard C. Wald, ABC News senior vice president, there probably won’t be as much TV coverage, at least on ABC, as attended the Pope’s first tour of the U.S. in 1979.

“We’ll not be doing that kind of massive daily reporting,” Wald said. “But he comes here at a time when he has great problems inside the Church in America and the world. It’s an interesting story to a lot of American Catholics, who represent a large portion of this country, and to Catholics around the world.”

The heavy coverage of the Pope’s 1979 visit “didn’t start out that way, but the story certainly became one that grew in intensity,” says Lane Venardos, executive producer of CBS News’ papal coverage this time out.

“The interest in it (the Pope’s previous U.S. tour) really went up.”

(Indeed. The final day of that visit included a polite but headline-making, face-to-face call by Sister Theresa Kane, a leader of American nuns, for Pope John Paul II to reconsider his stand against women becoming priests.)

This time, Venardos thinks, there’ll initially be extensive network coverage of the Pope, but perhaps not as much later on, barring a major news story that develops in the course of the pontiff’s American tour.

That may be, says Carl Eifert, spokesman for the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, the public policy arm of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

However, he says, there could be more coverage by local TV stations of the Pope’s entire tour because satellite technology has made it possible for those stations to cover more out-of-town stories than ever before.

“The business is different now,” he notes. “Local stations originate their own news, and they’re not as dependent upon the networks as before. And cable has come into existence since then (the 1979 tour).”

As in 1979, the massive number of requests for press accreditation for the papal tour has forced those in charge to hire professional public relations firms to aid in print and broadcast press arrangements. (Some of the more irreverent insiders in the PR business refer to this as “the Pope account.”)

“You’re not doing real publicity, per se,” says George Glazer of Hill & Knowlton Inc., which was hired by the Catholic Conference to handle Fourth Estate requests for coverage of the Pope’s 1979 American tour. Instead of tub-thumping, as a PR firm would normally do for more worldly clients, the papal tour effort involves only the handling of press accreditations, logistics and broadcast pool arrangements, he says.

For the upcoming trip, the conference talked to six public relations firms and decided on Manning, Selvage and Lee Inc., whose Washington office is handling arrangements for reporters traveling with Pope.

But the major share of the work is falling on a Miami public relations firm owned by the legendary publicist Hank Meyer. He represented Miami Beach in its 1950-60s heyday and is best known, perhaps, for luring Jackie Gleason and his CBS show to Miami in the early 1960s.

The firm of Hank Meyer Associates Inc. was hired by the Catholic archdiocese of Miami because Miami, as the starting point of the papal tour, is where one gets press credentials good for the entire tour.

It is there that most press requests have come in. Walt Robshaw, a former newspaperman working for Meyer’s company at the archdiocese’s press command post--it’s called the Papal Visit Office--says at least 3,700 journalists have sought accreditation so far.

He had no breakdown between electronic and print personnel, but he estimates that CBS, NBC and ABC seek a combined total of 300 to 500 credentials for their staffs.

(In contrast, between 100 and 125 broadcast and print journalists usually accompany President Reagan when he is traveling, according to a White House spokesman. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics saw 8,250 accredited journalists and technicians.)

Other media mendicants include delegates from Brazilian, Canadian and Australian television, CNN, the BBC and even “Entertainment Tonight,” whose reportage usually concerns Tinseltown, not Te Deum.

Robshaw mused that the “E.T.” folk “probably are showing up to cover the people who are covering the Pope.”

It has been said--by print scribes, it must be admitted--that TV types go all-out in their quest for an exclusive, no matter what the circumstance.

Robshaw chuckled when asked if any hard-charging TV folks have told him it is absolutely imperative that they have an exclusive interview with Pope John Paul II.

“No,” he said. “So far, they’ve been a little more sophisticated than that.”