1988 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION : Jammed In, Press Also Finds the News Is Too Small to Handle

Imagine one of those sales where a builder puts up 200 houses for sale with no interest loans, and 13,000 people line up to buy them.

Welcome to the national press corps covering the Democratic National Convention.

Squeezed into a hall too small to hold them, in a city with too few nearby rooms to house them, covering a story that many agree is too small to occupy them, the best and brashest of the world’s media have gathered for a ritual that, like the human appendix, many here now believe no longer serves any real purpose.

Sense of Loathing

Presidential nominees are selected in primaries now, not in political conventions. Yet the press keeps coming each year, as if to the neighbors’ Christmas party, and with some growing sense of loathing.

After NBC aired its “scoop,” for instance--being the first network to air a live interview with Michael S. Dukakis opening night--an NBC vice president got up from his chair in the executive booth behind the control room, put on his jacket to leave and said: “Well, now that that’s over we can go back to entertainment programming for the rest of the week.”

“We got 70 reporters in the gulf covering the end of the war between Iraq and Iran, and we got 1,300 reporters interviewing the subway sandwich man outside the Omni convention hall,” said Michael J. Robinson, a media critic from Georgetown University.

Among the throng is the media elite, and sometimes it is hard to discern who are the politicians and who are the reporters.

Rather Comes With Bodyguard

Consider that CBS anchorman Dan Rather showed up at a pool-side party of the California delegation Tuesday to interview former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and brought along his own bodyguard.

The guard, of course, had all the accouterment of the presidential Secret Service, including radio plug in his ear and security pin in his lapel--this one with the CBS logo.

When Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall tried to report on a Democratic fund-raising party at an Atlanta hotel Sunday, he was turned away at the door. But he discovered that Rather and NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw had been invited, though it wasn’t clear they were coming. How can you let in CBS and NBC and not the Washington Post? Edsall demanded.

“Well, they’re not working press,” he was told.

Reporters are scattered dozens of miles apart, and not a downtown establishment has gone unbooked. Scripps Howard newspapers had their reporters in one hostelry with a reputation for deriving much of its business from devotees of the world’s oldest profession.

The real problem, though, is news, or the lack of it.

Three columnists here became so bored that they cut eyeholes in boxes, put them on their heads and walked around the designated protest area near the convention hall.

A horde of byline-starved reporters quickly surged toward them for interviews: “We’re just a bunch of guys standing around with boxes on their heads,” said a guy who identified himself as a member of the movement, “People With Boxes on Their Heads.”

A photo of the Boxhead people movement was sent over the wires.

Eventually, someone discovered these journalists were just interviewing other journalists. Then they wrote stories about the hoax--like this one.

Other reporters do much of their work in the downtown hotel lobbies, hunting for the roughly 4,000 delegates, who are outnumbered by media, 3 to 1. When a lucky reporter finds an unlucky delegate, a swarm of other reporters tends to follow.

Covering the story is made duller, reporters complain, by the Dukakis campaign, whose officials show annoying discipline: They tend not to leak news to reporters, and when they do speak publicly, they all say the same thing.

It is like talking to the same person over and over, only he has a different face and body.

“It’s sort of eerie,” said one reporter who has covered them much of the year. Then, with some concern, he asked that the remark be anonymous.

Answers Not Satisfying

The answers that reporters do get, reporters say, are also usually not all that satisfying.

At a briefing Tuesday morning, a reporter from Business Week magazine asked Dukakis national field director Charlie Baker what the campaign considered its base of electoral college votes this November.

“Good question,” National Journal reporter Ronald Brownstein whispered.

“That’s why it ain’t gonna get answered,” said Marie Coco of Newsday.

She was right. Baker declined to answer.

Staff writers John Balzar, David Lauter and Bob Drogin contributed to this story.