TV’s New Campaign Trail

The 1992 election campaign promises to be a difficult one for television.

The campaign opens with the three major networks in the schizophrenic position of cutting news budgets while at the same time trying to compete for an increasingly information-oriented audience.

PBS, where officials still don’t know if they’ll be able to raise the money to put on the programs they have planned, is in a comparable fix.

The only news outlet with money to burn is the Cable News Network, which suffers instead in the realm of audience: CNN’s ratings are far below those of the networks, and it can only be seen in about 60% of the nation’s homes.

The nation’s news providers are also hampered by nagging criticism of their performance last time around, in a 1988 campaign whose issues seemed to have been shaped by nine-second sound bites and controversial commercials such as the Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ads.

“I think in ’88 it was clear that there was way too much manipulation of the media by the candidates, and at the same time there was a far too narrow discussion of the issues,” said CNN political director Tom Hannon. “And I think television was a significant factor in all of that.”

But while all of the nation’s major news providers have said that they plan to remedy the sins of 1988 with better analysis and more frequent trips into the trenches to study the lives of ordinary people, they--with the notable exception of CNN--have also said that they are not planning to spend much extra money to do so.

“Money is going to be tight, there’s no doubt about it,” said Bill Wheatley, director of political coverage for NBC. “We have to watch our spending very closely.”

At NBC, as at CBS and ABC, nearly all of the election year coverage will be handled by existing reporting and editing staff, Wheatley said.

NBC and ABC plan to dramatically scale back their coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions, and all three of the broadcast networks say they will assign fewer crews and correspondents to individual candidates.

ABC has eliminated the practice of assigning a crew and correspondent to each candidate, and instead will rely on researchers. Correspondents will be flown in to the campaigns only when the network has decided to do a story, said political director Hal Bruno.

“It’s better journalism, and the fact that it happens to save money is a dividend,” Bruno said.

Outside of the network’s regular news programs, NBC plans to air hourlong prime-time programs on issues including education, the family, the nation’s economic competitiveness with Japan and Europe, and politics, Wheatley said.

CBS, despite an undisclosed cut in the budget for election coverage compared to 1988, will probably also add programs, although the network would not say how many.

“We are going to probably have more prime-time and late-night time committed this presidential election year than we did in 1988,” said Joe Peyronnin, vice president and assistant to the president at CBS News. “On the cost side, there is no question that we will be spending less, but we will be spending smarter.”

ABC, which also will spend less in 1992 than it did in 1988, does not plan to add extra programs at present, but might do so as issues arise, according to Bruno. The network is tentatively scheduled to host the March 5 debate among Democratic hopefuls.

The biggest commitment in terms of hours of coverage comes from CNN. On Monday, the all-news cable network begins airing a daily, half-hour news program, “Inside Politics ‘92,” devoted soley to the election.

Anchored by Bernard Shaw and Catherine Crier, the program will air weekdays at 1:30 and 9:30 p.m.

With the aid of a $3.5 million grant from the Markle Foundation, CNN has produced a two-hour documentary, “The People’s Agenda,” which is scheduled to air Feb. 2 at 9 p.m.

The network also plans to use the Markle funding--which was originally earmarked for PBS--to cover the campaign on a day-to-day basis. CNN plans to dispatch reporter Brooks Jackson to cover the way the candidates are manipulating the media and designing their advertising campaigns. Jackson will also look at campaign-finance issues. In addition, coverage of the campaign will be a staple of the network’s 24-hour news operation, Hannon said.

All of the news agencies say they will cover the Democratic and Republican conventions, but NBC and ABC do not plan to air them live during most of prime time.

Instead, NBC has loaned anchor Tom Brokaw and other staff members to the Public Broadcasting Service, which will use them along with “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” correspondents to provide in-depth coverage to PBS stations.

NBC will pick up the coverage already in progress at about 10 p.m. in the East (7 p.m. in Los Angeles)

ABC will air a summary of convention news during prime time, but will only carry important speeches live. PBS plans to carry the conventions live beginning at 5 p.m., and CNN plans gavel-to-gavel coverage.

According to Wheatley, the decision reflects the decreasing importance of the party conventions as vehicles for deciding who will be chosen to lead the Democratic or Republican ticket. While those decisions were previously made at conventions, Wheatley said, now they are made during the primary process. If candidates with a clear majority of votes are not chosen at this year’s primaries, he said, NBC will probably change its plans, and carry more of the conventions.

The move will also enable the network to bring in additional revenue by showing entertainment programming during the first hours of the conventions each night, Wheatley said.

“On the NBC network, there will probably be fewer total hours, unless we end up with a closely contested convention,” Wheatley said.

Ever-present and hoping to be seen as an alternative to the mainstream coverage is C-Span. The not-for-profit cable channel that covers politics will not only carry the conventions, but will travel with candidates, airing their speeches verbatim and conducting impromptu interviews throughout the campaign.

Altogether, C-Span plans to air about 1,000 hours of campaign coverage, according to Susan Swain, C-Span senior vice president. And C-Span plans to cover lesser-known candidates as well as the more prominent Democrats and Republicans.

“The goal is, rather than to be covering the news of the campaign, to give people who watch a better in-depth feel for the issues,” Swain said.

At PBS, where producers are smarting from sluggish private donations and corporate funding, most of the coverage of the campaign will be contained within existing news and public affairs programs, such as “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and “Frontline,” said Arnold Labaton, executive director of PBS election coverage.

“Frontline” is planning a mini-series tentatively titled “The State of Democracy,” with author William Greider, Labaton said. And the program will probably produce profiles of the final Democratic and Republican candidates.

In addition, a new series with journalist Bill Moyers, titled “Listening to America” and slated to premiere April 7, will treat some election-year issues.

But Labaton said that some of public television’s planned coverage is jeopardized by the slow economy. Even PBS’ highly publicized plans to cover the conventions in cooperation with NBC are in danger of collapsing because of lack of money, he said. In order to continue as planned, he said, PBS must raise between $500,000 and $1 million.

From PBS to the commercial networks, news providers insist that despite their economic woes, they plan to do a better job in ’92 than in ’88.

Still sensitive about the effectiveness of dirty campaign ads in 1988 and 1990, all five news organizations say they will focus attention to political commercials. Candidates who make false or exaggerated charges, the networks promise, will be called on the carpet for it.

And the broadcast networks in particular say they are abandoning the old practice of covering every stump speech and photo opportunity given by candidates.

“We’ve always felt a compulsion to make sure every candidate gets equal time, but when you get a campaign that doesn’t do anything other than stunts, maybe they don’t deserve equal time,” said Bruno of ABC. “A newspaper doesn’t print every press release it gets, so why should we broadcast every stunt the campaigns dream up?”

And the networks have big plans for changing the way campaign debates are conducted. The four commercial networks and PBS got together last year and came up with a new format they feel will cut down on the tendency of Presidential debates to degenerate into sound-bite shouting matches.

Under their proposal--which has not yet been accepted by either major party--candidates would no longer be questioned by a panel of journalists in front of an often highly partisan studio audience.

Instead, the Democratic and Republican candidates and a single moderator would meet in a closed studio, and the moderator would lead a discussion between the two on a single topic. There would be three presidential debates, one on foreign policy, one on domestic policy and one that would be open-ended. A single debate would be held with the vice presidential candidates.

But changing the way campaigns are brought into the average living room promises to be an uphill battle. Experts predict candidates will oppose the new debate format because it’s more difficult for them to manipulate. And despite the networks’ avowed plans to avoid publicity stunts and sound bites, the fact is that out on the campaign trail, when a candidate says something quotable that the competition might use, those intentions might be forgotten.

“At this time in the campaign year, there are usually people like me telling (media writers) how we’re going to do it different next time,” said CNN’s Hannon. “And at the end of the campaign there are seminars where we sit around talking about what went wrong.”