Taking a Hard Look at Campaign ’92 : Television: Stations vow to concentrate less on photo opportunities and more on economic and social ills--but will their budgets allow it?

In 1988, Vice President George Bush came to Southern California and, like many visitors, headed for Disneyland. There, dozens of TV cameras--on hand to cover his presidential race with Michael Dukakis--captured him riding on a float, his face beautifully back-lit by the setting sun.

The reporters accompanying those cameras knew that the picture had been set up by Bush’s staff to enhance his image. They knew that riding in a parade with Disney characters had nothing to do with the qualities necessary to be President. And they knew that earlier that day, Bush had made inaccurate statements about his opponent’s foreign policy positions.

“I tried very hard to make that point in my story,” recalled Linda Douglass, political editor at KNBC Channel 4. “And it was lost. Anything I said was just overwhelmed by that incredible picture. It was beautiful. He looked like the President of the United States. Now should I have resisted using that picture? I don’t know. It was just such a knockout. That’s our challenge this time around.”

Criticized in 1988 for focusing too much time on peripheral controversies and on staged media events such as the Disneyland parade and Dukakis’ ride in an army tank, local television journalists say they are thinking hard about where they went wrong in the last presidential campaign. And many of them pledge to avoid being hoodwinked this year by the slick strategies of the political handlers and instead to dig into the economic and social ills that confront the country.

“We do have to stop feeding the public the pabulum that is fed to us at some of these whistle stops,” said Jeff Wald, news director at KCOP Channel 13. “I think television news has fallen into a pattern of just mirroring what happens at the staged event. We have to be more skeptical.”

But they face this task at a time when financial woes within the broadcast industry have cut deeply into staff and travel budgets.

In the past, the three network-owned stations sent their own reporters on the road to cover the primaries in other states. This year, though station executives would not reveal precise budgets or logistics, such travel will be curtailed, forcing all stations to rely heavily on material supplied by the networks, CNN or affiliated local stations around the country.

With all that’s going on in California, turning over at least part of the job to others might be regarded as a blessing. Local reporters will have to grapple not only with the presidential campaign but also with two U.S. Senate races contested by about 10 major candidates; the implementation of a redistricting plan that will affect all 52 congressional races and all state legislative contests, and the implications of a term-limitation initiative passed by voters in 1990.

“Thank goodness there aren’t a bunch of voter initiatives on this year’s ballot,” Douglass said.

Cutbacks have reduced Douglass’ support staff to “just me and my cellular phone,” she said, but she believes she will be able to do as thorough a job as ever. Several other broadcasters warn, however, that she and other reporters assigned to politics are in danger of being swamped.

And that plays right into the hands of the savvy “spin doctors,” said Dan Gingold, an assistant professor of journalism at USC and a former news producer at Channel 2, suggesting that even as local television reporters brim now with good intentions, they will perform inadequately this political season.

The problem is exacerbated, Gingold said, by the fact that only a few L.A. stations employ political specialists like Douglass. Most rely heavily, and some exclusively, on general-assignment reporters who, because they don’t follow the nuances of politics all year, are hard-pressed to read between the lines and provide “any multidimensional coverage.”

“Politics has never been a hot television news commodity except on the rare occasion when a campaign really gets exciting,” Gingold said. “The problem with local television news is that it’s largely reactive. They see something happen and they go follow it, bird-dogging the candidate, shooting the photo opportunity. Like the fire department, they wait for the alarm to ring and then they go out. It’s a noble philosophy to say you will not be taken in by the spin doctors, but I don’t see how they will make it work.”

Douglass countered that she is committed this year to answering the question of what would each candidate mean for Southern Californians. She concedes that the news media erred in 1988 by believing that “the country was doing OK,” but with the recession now, she said, candidates will be unable to duck the issues so easily.

“I think the economy is just a story that overpowers every sort of Roger Ailes-inspired manipulation,” Douglass said, referring to Bush’s former campaign adviser.

Roger Bell, news director at KABC Channel 7, agreed. “Of course, politicians are glib. That’s how they get elected,” he said. “But this time, who will speak most directly to the issue of jobs and the economy and who the public is likely to believe is what we will want to concentrate on.”

“I feel some guilt as a reporter for contributing to the alienation and the anger that the public feels toward politicians,” Douglass said. “You have to say shame on them, shame on those who have sought the public trust for failing to address the issues that affect us all. But if we don’t address those issues this year, then shame on us .”

As for the relentless “photo opportunities,” most TV journalists agree that they have no choice but to attend. If the event proves to be frivolous, they said, then they should tell their viewers just that. KABC’s Bell and Warren Cereghino, KTLA Channel 5’s news director, said that they trust that viewers are smart enough to see through the candidates’ campaign stunts.

“If the candidates choose not to talk about the issues, and they don’t, we can’t force them into it,” said Josh Mankiewicz, KCAL’s political reporter. “We can’t control where they go and what they do. But our job is to say that nothing of substance happened here. If the candidate is engaged in a meaningless day of generating nothing but symbols and platitudes, we are remiss if we don’t say that this is all the candidate is up to.”

Only Leo Greene, news director at KTTV Channel 11, said flat out that his station will refuse to air “pointless photo ops.”

“We have to decide when to do stories and not let them dictate what we should broadcast,” Greene said. “If the President goes to milk a cow, you have to be there in case he gets shot. But you don’t have to air it. The candidates are purely driven by strategy. We want them to give us solutions to our problems; they want to win the election. We cannot make them answer hard questions. But we can help the viewer understand how a candidate is or is not dealing with an issue. That in itself might be very telling.”

But a pack mentality rules local TV news, said Bob Jimenez, a KCBS reporter who will cover the campaign. “If everyone else is there, you don’t want to miss it. And you don’t want to miss something that other stations put on the air, especially if it’s volatile.”

To completely escape the influence of the campaign strategists, several political reporters agreed, would take nothing less than a revamping of local news philosophy. TV stations, they said, would have to cover politics year-round and assign reporters to the job full-time so that they were prepared to handle the overload and the spin of a campaign season.

But such a change is improbable.

“You can’t be all things to all people,” KTLA’s Cereghino said, explaining why local news neglects politics most of the time. “You can’t cover everything in the off-season. The American people are rather apathetic about it in off years.”

“More coverage is better than less to some folks, while other folks say, ‘Enough of politics. Politicians don’t affect my immediate life,’ ” KABC’s Bell said. “It’s a constant balancing act we do in the news business over how much coverage we should give to government stories, even in a political year.”