Summit Coverage Is a Real Sleeper : Television: Networks get marks for technical merit in center of the storm, but were left groping for words to sum up momentous meeting of the superpowers.

Malta schmaltza.

You could have awakened early Sunday to catch live TV coverage of the just-concluded Malta summit. The coverage began at 4 a.m., but to be honest, there wasn’t much to see at first.

Seated together almost like bookends, President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave their separate statements to the cameras and then held a joint press conference for the throng of reporters gathered with them on the Soviet luxury liner Maxim Gorky.

Searching for words as momentous as the occasion, TV reporters were running around quoting people like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. However, no one picked up on the symbolism of the boat’s namesake, Gorky, a writer whose works bridge the literature of old Russia and the Communist era just as Gorbachev’s political works bridge the old and new Soviet Unions.

Nor did anyone note the symbolism of the Bush-Gorbachev summit being disrupted and Bush almost being toppled into the drink Saturday by perilously stormy seas. Fundamentalists may see that as God expressing anger at Bush for getting cozy with an atheist.

Bush and Gorbachev gave “strong, relaxed performances,” Dan Rather said on CBS after the press conference. “Both of them looked extremely relaxed,” Peter Jennings echoed on ABC.

Yes, yes, of course. But surely, relatively few Americans watched the two leaders and the post-news conference coverage early Sunday morning. There was no compelling reason to watch.

Credit the networks with another Herculean effort in mobilizing personnel and technology to swoop down on an important story in difficult conditions. You have to marvel at the achievement.

Most of what they said Sunday morning will be forgotten, however, and half--words as fleeting as flimsy tissues that you pull from a box, use and then toss away--deserves to be forgotten.

In times like these, TV is journalism’s hair trigger. Bush’s and Gorbachev’s summations were still echoing when on came the anchors, on came the correspondents, on came the scholars and pundits, on came the Administration’s public opinion manipulators and on came anyone else who wanted a crack at instant profundity.

The question from CNN: “What’s been accomplished here despite all the adverse conditions?” A lot of colds, probably.

On NBC’s “Sunday Today,” which was expanded for the morning, it was ye olde “correspondents’ round table,” in which reporters fresh from covering the summit shared their speculations about what was achieved and what it all meant with the program’s co-host, Garrick Utley, who was in Malta with them. Now, these are obviously all bright guys who know their business, but they seemed to be blowing bubbles, and only one of them had a comment about the summit results that fit the occasion.

“Let’s wait and see,” cautioned John Dancy, obviously a revisionist thinker.

On television, there is no waiting, only seeing.

Sunday’s joint press conference was said to be historic. Two men answering questions in a very measured way, each trying to eclipse the other without showing it? Historic perhaps, but a picture that seemed orchestrated and somehow miniscule compared to some of the other history-making pictures that TV has given us in 1989: from Beijing, from the Berlin Wall, from Prague.

In recalling these, it occurs to you just how profound TV can be, how its pictures have charted change in red neon and helped liberate us from the tyranny of Cold War stereotypes and cliches. And in rerunning the past--pictures of brutally crushed rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia come to mind--it can also inform the younger crowd that there was a time when at least some of the stereotypes did apply.

Like most media, TV news is essentially reactive. At its best, though, it opens the door of knowledge, if belatedly, using the occasion of anniversaries and such epic events such as the summit to pause and reflect even as it also shoots from the hip.

Reflection is what correspondent Robert Abernathy provided in a really nice “Sunday Today” piece that questioned how the Soviet Union could be so advanced in space technology and yet produce such inferior consumer products? The answer: In space, the Soviets are pushed by the United States. On the consumer front, there is no competition. You buy the lousy washer or no washer at all.

Appropriately, “CBS Sunday Morning” followed the summit with, among other things, a rerun of its wonderful piece on the Red Army Chorus opening its United States tour in New York. There was even Soviet-style Gershwin, a soloist singing: “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin.”

Alas, the seeds of perestroika.

There’s a reason why “CBS This Morning” is still TV’s best news program. It seemed to be singing all morning, for later in the program came a story narrated by Charles Osgood about a choir from Hungary visiting Arizona.

Some sights were mentioned, including the Grand Canyon. Now that’s a symbol for you, as the gap between East and West--once as wide as the Grand Canyon--continues to narrow so dramatically.

Here were these Hungarians in Arizona absorbing U.S. culture, but singing their own national anthem, as the screen filled with recent pictures of their countrymen at home, joyously running through the streets and waving flags to celebrate their recently won freedoms.

On the Mediterranean, a summit of world leaders; on the screen, a summit of emotions.

“It’s been quite a morning,” said Charles Kuralt. And quite a year.