COLUMN ONE : Coverage Beyond the Sound Bite : The media are experimenting with new methods that pressure candidates and shape agendas. The goal is to police the process and tune in to voter concerns.

Convinced that something is wrong with politics and stirred by the sense that they bear part of the blame, some of the nation’s biggest news organizations are vowing to change the way they cover the 1992 presidential campaign.

If they succeed, it could put the press on a collision course with the candidates and mark the first major change in political journalism in decades.

Good intentions attend the start of every campaign season, the way rice is thrown at newlyweds or, maybe more fittingly, the way aching bones foreshadow the onset of flu. But this time, veterans of the press corps think they and their colleagues might just mean it.

At the Washington Post, editors and reporters talk about learning what voters care about and making it a theme in their coverage--even if candidates want to ignore it.

At Knight-Ridder Newspapers, the company has tested ways of focusing on issues at its Wichita, Kan., paper that actually may have boosted voter turnout--and will be used by the company in its presidential campaign coverage.

And NBC has suggested it might just say no to airing some of the campaign’s pseudo events and canned rhetoric and focus more on candidates’ leadership qualities.

Some journalists dismiss the new coverage ideas as utopian fantasy that misread the brutish and irrational way politics works. And many political consultants think that if the media succeed in their reforms, they will be stepping beyond the bounds of reporting.

But some reporters and editors say three things are different this year. First, voters seem repulsed by politics and eager for change.

Also, a growing number in the media--and this is new--believe the press are partly to blame, in part because they say old reporting methods no longer work well.

And third, most news organizations may be forced to change because of drastically shrunken budgets, particularly at the three major commercial TV networks.

“The political process, including political journalism, is drifting further and further away from everyday people,” said Clark Hoyt, Washington bureau chief of Knight-Ridder Newspapers. “So our aim is to pay more attention to what voters’ concerns are in a language that people use.”

In general, news organizations are talking about sending fewer reporters out with candidates, fewer to conventions, doing less polling and spending more time with citizens looking at the nation’s problems. They may also spend less time poking into candidates’ private lives and more into their public records.

Some of this has already started. Earlier this month, the Washington Post launched the first of its efforts to cover the campaign differently--a two-part series titled “Voices of Discontent” that sought to identify both what problems most concern Americans and the sources of deep disaffection with politics. The series, political editor Bill Hamilton says, will be a “template” for the Post’s campaign coverage, arguably the nation’s most influential.

CBS has launched “Listening to the Candidates,” a series that counters criticism that TV “sound bites” are so brief viewers scarcely get to hear the candidates speak in complete paragraphs. The series simply airs large sections of a candidate’s stump speech to let voters hear the messages.

“NBC Nightly News” has premiered a series called “Voices of the People,” which will cover citizens rather than candidates; and the “Today” show recently aired a lengthy four-part series on President Bush’s record, in which each story ran more than five minutes.

And at Knight-Ridder, its series called “In Pursuit of Leadership” will try, as its maiden story said, to “Listen to the voice of America: From every corner of the land comes a common lament. The system isn’t working. The country is off track. Government and politics stink.”

Like much in politics, a good deal of this is a reaction to the last national campaign, and tracking it is an interesting example of how media consensus is formed.

In January, 1990, the Washington Post’s influential senior political correspondent, David Broder, launched a series of columns that amounted to a crusade against the state of politics and political journalism. Campaigns had become such exercises in “public disillusionment and political cynicism,” Broder declared, that they were undermining the political process.

And part of the problem, Broder said, was the press. The traditional forms of political reporting, he wrote, no longer could deal adequately with the techniques of contemporary politics--from made-for-TV campaign stops to symbolic “wedge issues” designed to polarize voters. In 1988, for instance, many in the press had difficulty explaining subliminal messages about race, crime and values implicit when George Bush made prison furloughs a central campaign theme.

For the last 30 years, contemporary political reporting has followed a variant of the model Theodore H. White developed in his “The Making of the President” books. White saw campaigns as heroic clashes of men and ideology, offering insight into the national mood. And to tell his stories, White was among the first to look backstage at the handlers, strategists and growing use of technology.

As political parties shriveled in influence and the technicians who replaced them refined their methods, political reporting began to forgo the clash of ideology and national mood-taking. Internal matters became the focus--who was ahead and why. White’s “The Making of the President” series, in effect, gave way to Joe McGinnis’ more cynical 1968 book “The Selling of the President,” which suggested that ideas scarcely mattered and saw campaigns as exercises in image making.

The insider approach has backfired, Broder suggested. In trying to dissect distorted campaign tactics, “We have magnified their effectiveness by publicizing the very messages we deplore,” he said. And not only did the press have to change, it should help “reconnect” campaigns to governing, Broder said.

Others in the press took notice. Boiled down, the reform ideas called for the press to police the process rather than just describe it; to refuse to automatically broadcast staged events or manipulative, repetitive messages; and to find out what voters cared about and how the candidates and their records related to those concerns.

By the 1990 midterm elections, dozens of newspapers took up the challenge by policing the fairness and accuracy of political TV commercials in local races--a technique that came to be known as “Truth Boxes.”

The truth boxes hardly vanquished ill will from American politics. But they apparently made some of the ’90 attack ads more accurate.

Campaigns began offering some proof of their claims. A few distorted ads had to be yanked off the air. And candidates wrongly attacked found they could quote the local newspaper in response ads.

Some in the media went further. In the 1990 Kansas governor’s race, Knight-Ridder’s Wichita Eagle focused coverage around 10 key issues it decided were most important to voters. The paper did an in-depth story on each issue, pressed candidates on these concerns, and on the six Sundays before Election Day ran a full page outlining the problems and where candidates stood on them.

When the paper began, the front-runner in the race had no positions on any of the 10 key issues. After an initial protest, however, she took some.

Readers, meanwhile, told Knight-Ridder researchers they particularly liked a voters guide sent to every home in the county that, among other things, even told them how to operate the local voting machines.

And reader reaction seemed to challenge many media assumptions. The Knight-Ridder research found that more than 80% of readers said they read the repetitive Sunday issues pages, and nearly 70% read the lengthy issue stories. And the readers had least regard for traditional daily political coverage and stories about polling.

Perhaps as a result, voter turnout in the county increased 1% from the last comparable governor’s race, in contrast with a 1% decline statewide and a 3.5% decline nationwide.

Knight-Ridder plans to use the lessons of Wichita in its presidential campaign coverage. While careful about revealing details, the principle will be to tailor coverage to politics as voters see it. People “are disgusted with both the political machinations and how we cover them,” said Knight-Ridder Washington bureau chief Hoyt.

Editors and reporters at the Washington Post say they have been motivated to change their coverage because they think traditional methods did not enable them to comprehend much of what happened in the 1988 campaign.

“We missed . . . not so much the flag as the hidden issues it meant to people” and why it worked, said Post political editor Hamilton, referring to George Bush’s use of the pledge of allegiance as a major campaign theme.

In addition to building coverage around the issues voters consider most pressing, the Post wants to find better ways of probing the elusive question of character.

The press may have gone too far probing candidates’ private lives, several journalists believe, and perhaps should spend more time scouring past public records for more instructive lessons on how a presidential aspirant will act, particularly on the concerns voters identify.

NBC intends to follow advice its Washington bureau chief, Timothy J. Russert, spelled out in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. Russert suggested his network:

* Stop airing “photo opportunities,” except to help depict a substantive report.

* Keep the most seasoned political reporters off the campaign planes, where they become imprisoned by the candidate’s message.

* Take the stump speeches and thoroughly analyze them in a series of reports.

* Do the same with commercials.

CBS Vice President for News Joe Peyronnin said his network recognizes that voters need to get a longer, more in-depth look at candidates.

“We are going to get away from the sound bite,” Peyronnin said. “We want to give the various candidates more time on our evening news and other broadcasts to at least express their views.” He added that these views would be examined and, if necessary, challenged by CBS reporters.

The networks also have embraced a new formula for debates: no rules, a single moderator, and the two candidates simply going at it. The networks already have offered the candidates prime time hours next fall for such a face-off.

The two parties have received the idea coolly, questioning the network role in setting the format. “These are decisions only the candidates can make,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Clayton K. Yeutter.

Nor do all journalists like the new coverage reform movement.

Sidney Blumenthal, an editor of the New Republic magazine, considers the idea of sticking to voter concerns “wonderfully utopian,” but “completely wrongheaded.”

“There is a whole school of thought that our politics is somehow a fraud and that if only public opinion were allowed to truly express itself the true issues would emerge.” But candidates talk about the issues they do because “they are real enough to a lot of people,” said Blumenthal.

And to many political consultants, the media have no business trying to play reformer.

“Who established these people to be the agenda setters?” asked Republican consultant Eddie Mahe. It is up to the candidates, not the media, to define the key campaign issues, he said.

Mahe also expressed doubt the reform ideas will work. “The press can’t write in a sustaining way about something the candidates aren’t talking about themselves.”

Many journalists also have doubts, including editors at the New York Times.

“I don’t think it is realistic to see ourselves in news departments taking a leadership role in shaping the campaign, no matter how embedded we are in the process,” said New York Times Managing Editor Joseph Lelyveld.

“I think you try to provide as much perspective as you can,” he said, including focusing more on voters, “but not with any big expectation that it will shape the campaign or change it.”

Editors at the Los Angeles Times also want change, but with a sense that their role is limited.

“We’re going to make a concerted effort to report on the voters’ views on the issues of most concern to them, and whether they believe the candidates are effectively addressing those issues as the campaign unfolds,” said Norman C. Miller, national editor of the Los Angeles Times. “But we don’t have any pretensions of setting an agenda for the campaign. Ours is a reporting task.”

Others in the media are still trying to decide their coverage plans. At ABC, the No. 1 rated network, special programming executive producer Jeff Gralnick says the news department will “use the same basic model” of candidate coverage as in 1988. But he adds, “We have got to find a way to get at what these candidates are thinking, not what they are saying.”

Finally, there is the question of whether the press sticks to its good intentions. Lean times could help. The networks already saved funds in covering candidate announcements by using local affiliate footage and having correspondents assemble and write the story from their home offices. And network executives express doubt that full-time correspondents will be assigned to every candidate.

Such economic necessities could prove a virtue, journalists say, by forcing reporters and editors to exercise more judgement about what stories will serve and stimulate the public.

“We will go in and out of campaigns as we feel we need to,” said CBS’ Peyronnin. “We won’t be so trapped in the day-to-day warfare.”