Many Top Political Reporters Leaving the Job : Journalism: Correspondents now express the same malaise about campaigns that voters have been showing.

Once, setting out to cover a national political campaign, with a fresh trench coat and a handsome expense account, was about as good as it got in journalism.

Now, suddenly, some of the most important names in the business are saying they want off the bus.

The latest to jump is Michael Oreskes, the New York Times’ national political correspondent for a year, who Monday became the paper’s city editor in New York.

A month ago, Paul Taylor of the Washington Post wandered into his editor’s office to say he wanted out. “I can’t tell you what a blow it was,” said David Broder, a Post columnist and dean of American political correspondents, who had moved aside to let Taylor become the paper’s lead political reporter.

Political reporters have similarly left the beat at the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Boston Globe, NBC News and the Los Angeles Times, which lost both of its California political writers, John Balzar and Keith Love.

“I sense something here and I don’t know what it is,” said Oreskes, “but too many people have packed up.”

In many cases there is a common thread: The political journalists are feeling the same malaise and disenchantment with politics that voters have been showing.

They complain that politics has become trivial, stage-managed and disconnected from meaningful issues. Some say covering campaigns has become intellectually unfulfilling. Some doubt that readers care any longer. And some are tired of what they see as a lack of honesty among candidates.

“I desperately needed to run off and talk to someone who believed what they were telling me,” said Balzar of The Times, now the paper’s Seattle bureau chief.

Those involved say the trend also reflects other factors, including a decline in the impact of newspapers on politics, a decline of the reporter’s importance in a more editor-driven era and the diminished role of the reporter as a political interpreter in an age of live television.

One key issue for Larry Eichel of the Philadelphia Inquirer, now the paper’s London correspondent, was the “disconnection between electing and governing.” Campaign issues appeared to have nothing to do with the offices people were running for, and he found covering politics emotionally stimulating but intellectually unchallenging.

“When the campaign rhetoric disappears the morning after the election and no one seems surprised or even bothered, that obviously suggests something is wrong,” Eichel said.

“Reporters are drawn to the vital places and the vital things,” said Balzar. “So is it any wonder they are joining with other citizens in searching for ideas, for leadership, for consensus, for what is vital in America’s future, in places other than behind a rope at a staged event where a politician is applauded by a hand-picked audience for saying nothing?”

It was not always thus, insists Laurence I. Barrett, chief political correspondent for Time magazine in 1988, who is now deputy Washington bureau chief and is undecided about his plans for 1992. Barrett, who began covering politics in 1964, said that through most of his career campaigns were often about fairly epic issues cast against a dramatic backdrop. “You were mentally engaged every day,” but the drill began to become “progressively more arid” after 1980.

The sense that readers now care less about politics also wears on political reporters, who report seeing signs of public turnoff not only in voter turnout but in their shriveling mail from readers.

“The fact that an increasing part of our audience is tuning out of politics,” said Barrett, “makes it even (more) psychically debilitating.”

To some degree this is a cycle that feeds on itself, said Broder of the Post. “The public is turned off, so editors look more skeptically at political coverage . . . so it is not the easiest way to get into the paper any more.”

Taylor’s decision to change jobs at the Post exemplifies this notion that the vital issues of the day are outside the electoral process. He will now cover children and family issues, an idea that came to him while talking to voters.

“A very typical conversation in suburban St. Louis or wherever you are,” Taylor said, would involve first having to coax people to talk, since they were turned off by politics. “But once they did talk, you find that, first, they were very sophisticated about things even if they weren’t paying attention, and, second, they sense this distance from politics but they care about issues, and their frame of reference--their prism--is their own family,” Taylor said.

The disenchantment with political reporting also may say something about journalism itself. Longtime political writer Jack Germond argues that being a reporter is less important in some ways than before.

“Most of the good people of my generation . . . had offers to become editors,” Germond said “but the thought of going inside was just absolutely horrifying. You (reported) until your legs gave out.”

Germond thinks television has an impact on reporting, not only making campaigns more stage-managed, but also diminishing the role of the political interpreter. Audiences can see things for themselves through television. And so can editors, who now may decide what they think of an event long before the reporter calls in.

“We are less than the medium (TV), and thus less important (as a filter) between the event and the voter than we used to be,” said Jon Margolis of the Chicago Tribune, a 15-year veteran of the campaign drill who gave it up at the age of 48 after the 1988 campaign to write about sports and life in general.

Networks now cover campaigns without correspondents much of the time, using only a camera crew and a young producer instead.

This technology, with its instant movement of information and TV images, has made reporting less important and elevated the editors’ role, journalists and communications scholars argue.

“There are fewer papers that we all think of as reporters’ papers,” said Germond, “and an awful lot of papers are edited a lot more tightly with a lot more joint decision making.”

Some journalists believe that the problems with politics are temporary, and many of them say they may go back to political reporting some day. Former NBC chief political correspondent Ken Bode believes, as Broder does, that the news media--and particularly the networks--have the power to change the nature of politics.

“The campaigns set up the visuals for the networks and the networks have found those visuals irresistible,” said Bode, now professor and director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University in Indiana. “What TV has got to do is stop taking the handouts.”

For Oreskes at the New York Times, the decision to leave to become city editor in New York, his hometown, was less a repudiation of politics than a dream come true, though he did say that “to the extent that politics is brutish and mean, coming back to New York (as city editor) is not necessarily the best escape.”

While he shares his colleagues’ concern about the decline of politics, he believes that decline itself is a great story.

But Oreskes also feels that the grind and travel of covering politics is even harder today.

“A lot of us have put off having families and are trying to figure out how, in our mid-thirties, to start doing some of those things . . . while balancing our high frequent-flier-mile careers,” he said.