MEDIA POLITICS : Same Thing No Sure Thing on Evening News

Now, only weeks before Election Day, “you are on the news every night,” Michael S. Dukakis’ press spokesman, Dayton Duncan, said recently in explaining campaign media strategy.

So the men who would be President can go fewer places each day, not struggle so hard to make news, and just keep hammering away at their basic messages.

Duncan’s assessment is wrong, argued ABC’s Sam Donaldson and CBS’ Bruce Morton when told of Duncan’s comments. They said that a candidate who keeps repeating himself stops being news.

That may now be happening, if the comments of the anchormen and the newscasts of recent days are an indication. Friday, neither Dukakis nor George Bush earned a network news story. It was the second time in five nights that both candidates had been shut out on at least two networks. All three networks Friday gave time instead to President Reagan doing play-by-play announcing of a Cubs-Pirates baseball game in Chicago.

And the anchormen are even leveling some nasty asides about the candidates’ repetitive negativism, echoing perhaps public sentiment detected in recent polls.

Dan Rather on Friday sounded almost annoyed: Bush “went again to Massachusetts, and again called Dukakis soft on crime, and again took a well-orchestrated endorsement from a local policemen’s organization.”

What message this reinforces is unclear, but it might be that this is not an inspiring campaign.

NBC looked at how voters on Chicago’s southwest side, an area dominated by working-class Democrats who voted for Reagan, saw the race. The piece was carefully balanced and not particularly conclusive.

Vice Presidential Derby

CBS took the day to focus on the vice presidential derby, anticipating Wednesday’s vice presidential debate.

That offered both vice presidential candidates a chance to finally get some of their message on the air. Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen got to make a brief appeal to Reagan Democrats, saying: “Why don’t you come home now?” and had two sound bites belittling his opponent, Republican Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana.

Television research suggests a sound bite here and a sound bite there does not add up to much. Americans tend to tune out news. Only advertisements are forgotten more quickly. So these things need to add up to penetrate public consciousness.

Quayle got a couple of sound bites as well, but probably got the worst of the coverage.

For instance, Rich Bond, Bush’s former deputy campaign manager and now a key Quayle handler, delivered a particularly flaccid defense of his man: “I think our point is that people aren’t going to vote against George Bush because of it.”

“It,” the report made clear, is the widespread opinion revealed in polls that most Americans do not think Quayle is qualified to be President should something happen to Bush.

Meanwhile, former CIA Director Stansfield Turner’s charge that he had taken Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega off the CIA payroll in 1977 and that Bush put him back on in 1981 got a small ride on the networks, but probably not enough to mean much.

Bush spokesman Stephen Hart later said Turner’s statement was “patently false--untrue.”