Summit No Piece of Cake for the Media : Lack of Sleep, Good Food, Access Has Reporters Grousing

Was ABC understaffed and overworked? Why didn’t Sam Donaldson get close to the President? Did Dan Rather “hog” the evening news?

These were just some of the questions begging to be answered--but not by superpower spokesmen Marlin Fitzwater and Gennady Gerasimov--at the end of the fourth Reagan-Gorbachev summit, which even veteran network TV correspondents described as among the most frustrating and grueling events they’ve ever covered.

Complaints about the lack of sleep due to the 8-hour New York-Moscow time difference, the heavily choreographed media show put on by the White House and the Kremlin, the lousy Soviet hotel rooms and still lousier food were almost universal.

About the only TV news notables seeming to have any fun were NBC’s Bryant Gumbel and ABC’s Pierre Salinger, who ate their way down the catfish-and-crawfish menu of the only American restaurant in Moscow, a Cajun cafe set up at the Mezhdunarodnaya International Hotel by Louisiana chef John Folse.

An obviously fatigued NBC White House correspondent Chris Wallace, echoing the experiences of his colleagues, claimed to be putting in 18-hour days because of the amount of summit news being generated.

Because of the time difference, live satellite coverage for the morning news shows began at mid-afternoon Moscow time, and when coverage was extended for West Coast viewers, the broadcasts stretched into mid-evening in Moscow. By the time the evening news shows began in New York, correspondents were into the wee hours of the morning.

“I’ve been up till 2 every morning doing 3, 3 1/2 minutes at the top of the show every night,” he groused.

As a result, most of the news people couldn’t find time to eat or sleep--much less go for a stroll around Red Square as Dan Rather was doing Tuesday when he bumped into Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev and did an impromptu interview.

“It’s a problem for any of us to get out,” said Donaldson, ABC’s White House correspondent. “I want to see everything and be everywhere. And once upon a time I did these kinds of things, because it was a smaller press corps and a smaller day.”

Donaldson, who is leaving the White House beat in January after 12 years, recalled that when Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter met in Vienna and signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, “I was in the room, right in the front row. When they bear-hugged, I had to get out of the way so they didn’t grab me. And I loved it.

“Here, it’s antiseptic.”

Donaldson acknowledged that his usually “atmospheric” first-day summit piece this time around might not have been as good as usual because he had seen the President only “on television, except for one pool yesterday in which I went to the Writers Hall and I had to sit in the back of the room and with my glasses on.”

Of the five pools this week deemed “important” by Donaldson, Cable News Network had three, and CBS and NBC had one each.

“The White House press office said it was the luck of the draw. I have no way of disbelieving them,” Donaldson said with a wry smile. “But at the Washington summit (in December), I had no pools. That was the ‘luck of the draw’ there also.”

Because of his “lack of ability to participate personally” at this summit, Donaldson hasn’t been reporting live as much as he’d like on “ABC World News Tonight.” But the correspondent, not known for his reticence, said he isn’t “storming and screaming up and down the halls” of the giant Rossiya Hotel just off Red Square, where the networks are based.

One reason may well be, as he noted, that “we’ve all seen glimpses of how the thugs with Soviet security can operate. It offends me.”

However, Donaldson admitted that he can’t blame the White House pool situation for the fact that he missed an important news conference Wednesday morning given by Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who had flown over at Reagan’s request to witness the signing of the newly ratified INF treaty.

(Because so many newspeople are covering the summit--5,365 reporters and staff, including 1,060 from the United States--a small “pool” is selected for most events and those journalists report back to their colleagues in written reports.)

Sam Donaldson miss a news conference?

“I’ve found at these things that if I don’t see it personally, if someone doesn’t thrust the paper in my hand, the cracks are so numerous for things to fall through,” he said sheepishly. “I discovered this at 11. But my desk knew about it last night at midnight. Now the desk didn’t do that by design. It’s just one poor guy is sitting there alone on the desk with too much to do and I didn’t get the word.”

One reason, according to John McWethy, ABC’s State Department correspondent, is that the network arrived in Moscow with a smaller staff than the other networks.

“We are understaffed for the amount of work we are trying to pump out,” he complained. “ ‘Nightline’ has been doing a piece nearly every night of the summit and they don’t have anybody here. So that means we draw from other people. The weekend shows have a single producer, and they put on five broadcasts. I have more stories than I can handle.”

But McWethy said the decision was made not so much because of cost cutting but because “in the past we looked silly because we were overstaffed.

“And yet at the Rossiya,” he added, “we still own half of the hotel. I mean we have a huge number of rooms just for the technical staff. And still given the number of original hours of broadcasting we’re doing, we barely have enough.”

The situation at CBS, apparently, was too many correspondents and too little air time this summit. At least, that’s what some CBS newspeople were saying privately, citing anchorman Dan Rather as the cause.

CBS changed its evening news formula for the summit on several nights to let Rather run the show by not only setting the scene from his anchor post but also by narrating all the key sound bites and voiceovers. Later in the broadcast, the correspondents sit down with him for a round table discussion.

“He takes the story, or so I gather,” said Donaldson.

One of the roundtable participants, Bill Plante, the CBS White House correspondent, maintained that he didn’t mind the format.

“There obviously are two ways to look at this. I’m not upset. I’m not upset at all. Because they’re trying to make the show look different. And it absolutely frees me up more than normal to do reporting. By not having the deadline restraint of cutting a piece, I have more time to talk to the newsmakers and spend a whole lot more time shmoozing.”

As usual, however, Donaldson had the last word on the subject.

“I’m not drawing a judgment,” the ABC newsman noted, “but why would you bring your correspondents if not to use them and in terms of our business showcase them along with your anchor?”