Expensive Bush ‘Deathwatch’ for Networks in Colombia

“This is a flat-out deathwatch,” CBS News’ Lane Venardos, director of special events coverage, said of today’s coverage of President Bush’s brief visit to Colombia for a four-nation drug summit.

The threat of violence by drug traffickers and anti-government guerrillas is paramount in the minds of people directing media coverage of the meeting.

“There’s no other reason for (the other networks) spending the kind of money that’s being spent down there,” Venardos said.

CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN have all demanded better access to Bush in Colombia than the White House had planned to give them. And they got it in the form of an expanded press pool, which was scheduled to accompany Bush to Cartagena, and include first-string White House reporters from each network.

All networks are spending more per hour on drug summit coverage than on any other story in recent months, said David Miller, NBC’s director of foreign news.

Miller said preparations for today’s coverage were much more difficult than for the Malta summit between Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. “In Malta there was no security question as such,” Miller said. “In Colombia, there’s a different situation.”

What makes the Cartagena coverage so expensive, Miller said, is the brevity of the trip.

“The problem for us,” Miller said, “is that for a visit lasting five hours, we have to do as much as if it lasted for five days. We have to put in multiple ground stations, direct dial telephones--arrange for translators, for couriers. . . all for a story that exists for (a few) hours and then goes away.”