Ringside Media Give Split Decision : Both Camps Hang Anxiously on Verdicts of News Analysts

Even before breaking for a commercial, the instant network analysts were offering the initial if somewhat tepid verdicts on Sunday’s presidential debate, and the results were, well--it depends which channel one had tuned in.

NBC leaned slightly toward George Bush. ABC scored the card for Michael S. Dukakis. CBS bashed both and called it a draw.

And the first public opinion poll, coming on ABC no less than 20 minutes after the end of the debate, showed Dukakis winning somewhat handily.

Political experts consider media reaction unusually powerful in determining winners and losers in presidential debates. For nearly half of all voters do not watch the debates, research shows, and many of those who do are uncertain what to make of them.

But debates can prove pivotal in deciding the presidency anyway, and the consensus generally is a mixture of which sound bites are picked and repeated, the polls and the media’s analysis, which campaign operatives try mightily to shape.

Cautious, Contradictory

This first night was cautious, contradictory, but apparently leaning slightly toward Dukakis.

Perhaps the most used phrase of the post-debate analysis was “no knockout,” a line heard on all three networks.

NBC commentator John Chancellor said Bush “scored more points than Gov. Dukakis,” but added: “I have no idea who won.”

Chancellor also thought Bush was “looser.”

ABC correspondent Brit Hume, however, thought Bush was tense, and “not nearly as smooth and articulate” as Dukakis. Hume thought Bush’s delivery was better in his acceptance speech in New Orleans.

Sam Donaldson concluded: “I think what we have here now is a tightened race.

“I think both men did extremely well . . . but Gov. Dukakis perhaps had more to gain than Vice President Bush and perhaps he gained it tonight. . . . He had to sort of put to rest a stereotype that Bush had been very good at pressing which was that Dukakis somehow was out of the mainstream,” Donaldson said.

Favor Challenger

“If in general first debates go to the challenger, you have a general leveling of the playing field now,” ABC’s Jeff Greenfield agreed, adding that Bush’s summation was “uncharacteristically . . . casual, uninspiring, kind of flat,” and Dukakis’ “far more eloquent.”

Bush, said Greenfield, was “occasionally meandering in his language” and returned to an old habit of employing English “almost as if it were a second language.”

CBS was more cautious: “Both men gave as good as they got,” said Bob Schieffer.

Bruce Morton strayed as far as to say that “if there was a winner on specifics it might be Mike Dukakis. He had more of them.”

And Pentagon correspondent David Martin noted that when asked if he could name three proposed weapons systems he didn’t like, two of those named by Bush the Pentagon had already canceled.

CBS anchor Dan Rather kept out of the spin game altogether, leaving the commentary to others.

ABC offered the first poll of the night, a 500-person sample that showed Dukakis winning, 45% to 36%, with 19% undecided.

With the media reaction so important, both campaigns toiled mightily to shape how the press viewed things, flying planeloads of politicians from Washington to North Carolina and making them available to reporters. The Dukakis campaign supplied reporters with a five-page fact sheet, complete with footnotes, anticipating Bush attacks.

‘Spin Doctors’

(When a Times reporter found his seat in the press room, a note was waiting for him that Reps. Edward R. Roybal (D-Los Angeles) and Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose) would be available for interviews at an indicated phone number, and later Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) was brought over to him.)

These “spin doctors” offered by the two campaigns seemed to come to a draw.

“The governor was on the attack most of the evening,” Bush campaign chairman James A. Baker III said. “I think that the vice president successfully blunted those attacks and rebutted in a very, very effective way.”

But, parried Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) of his man Dukakis: “I think he came across as presidential.”

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