Picture the Summit as a TV Talk Fest : Media: CNN and the networks valuably concentrate on the Soviets. But views vary with the anchor and the expert.

Forget about the Simpsons and break out the new T-shirts. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Gorby, dude.

Yes, Friday morning’s diverting appearance of First Ladies Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev at Wellesley College--covered live by CNN and the Big 3 networks--was not only great fun, but also a tribute to Barbara Bush’s ability to spin success from controversy. And what about those earlier TV pictures from the Bush-Gorbachev summit?

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Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Raisa touch down Wednesday at Andrews Air Force Base.

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President Bush and Gorbachev give their opening speeches Thursday at the White House.

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Gorbachev addresses luncheon guests at the Soviet Embassy.

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Raisa is a guest at the Library of Congress.

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Outside the White House, Gorbachev gives an impromptu press conference after his first meeting with Bush.

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In an unscheduled handshaking tour, Gorbachev springs from his limo and disappears into a throng of Washingtonians. “Now he’s working both sides of 15th Street,” reports CNN’s Bernard Shaw.

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Bush and Gorbachev toast each other at a White House banquet.

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Gorbachev addresses--at times even lectures and debates with--congressional leaders at breakfast Friday in the Soviet Embassy.

All very nice, sometimes even fascinating. What makes television coverage of the summit so compelling is not the pictures, however. It’s the talk.

Not so much the talk of Bush and Gorbachev, but the talk of those watching them.

Accompanying this gathering of world leaders is an even larger TV gathering of professional Soviet watchers. It’s as if some Eastern universities and think tanks gave their specialists time off this week to appear on TV. From CBS to C-SPAN, they fill the screen.

As usual on Soviet-related topics, CBS gives you Stephen Cohen of Princeton while ABC offers Robert Legvold of Columbia, as well as Marshall Goldman of Harvard and journalist Hedrick Smith. NBC has the oft-seen Soviet foreign ministry official Vitaly Churkin and William Hyland,editor of Foreign Affairs. And there are others.

At no other time than summits does TV offer such a concentrated discussion of the Soviet Union, and it’s all wonderfully entertaining. It’s also important, for this intense focusing--as CNN and, to a lesser extent, the other networks weave through the summit--is invaluable in centering our attention on crucial issues.

When watching the summit coverage, however, channel hopping is the best course.

That’s because there has been no consensus here, and what strikes you most about the experts--as well as the media covering this event--is that they disagree frequently:

Gorbachev is politically strong at home; he’s weak at home. He’s about to be toppled; he’ll survive indefinitely. Boris Yeltsen will supplant Gorbachev; Yeltsen is more bark than bite. Gorbachev needs to look good with Bush to impress the people at home; the average Soviet at home doesn’t give a hoot about the summit. Gorbachev is pretending to deal from strength; Gorbachev is feigning weakness to gain concessions from an American President who wants to keep him in power.

Even on small things, there are clashing observations. When Gorbachev went on his handshaking tour Thursday, CNN’s Bernard Shaw found it ironic that the Soviet leader could go out among the people in the United States, where his popularity is high, but not in his own nation, where his popularity is low.

When ABC’s “World News Tonight” covered the same story, however, Peter Jennings said that Gorbachev does go out among the people at home.

Among other things, the summit coverage has exposed the meaninglessness of political labels. The talk on TV has been that Gorbachev is less liberal than Yeltsen, who has called for faster democratic reforms, and less conservative than Kremlin hard-liners, who seek a return to old repressive ways.

In other other words, proponents of democracy in the Soviet Union are left-wingers and Marxists are right-wingers. Get it? Conservatives are pinko and liberals are reactionary. And the President of the Soviet Union is somehow a centrist. Or something like that.

We need experts to interpret speeches, right? Gorbachev’s opening address contained a reference to the suffering of the Soviet people during World War II. On ABC, Goldman interpreted this as Gorbachev justifying Soviet fears of a more-powerful united Germany facing the Soviet Union as a member of NATO.

Probably so. Yet why didn’t Gorbachev just come out and say it? In fact, why do world leaders and diplomats speak an obtuse language that has to be dissected under a microscope, leaving open the possibility of misinterpretation?

Things that pass unnoticed: One was Soviet journalist/reporter/you-pick-the-label Vladimir Pozner saying on CNN’s “Crossfire” that he recently prepared a story on Yeltsen but “Soviet television wouldn’t put it on.” Another was Bush and Gorbachev, who supposedly are meeting to make the world a safer place, getting a traditional salute--from cannon.

The summit has not been without humor. From Johnny Carson on NBC, about his audience waiting in line to attend “The Tonight Show”: “If you stood in line that long in the Soviet Union, you could have gotten a potato.” From Dan Rather on CBS: “It’s been said about Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, he could talk a dog off a meat wagon.”

After Wellesley, Barbara Bush could too.