PERSPECTIVE ON THE MEDIA : Couch-Potato Power Works Both Ways : Participatory democracy comes alive on talk shows, where candidates and voters can both speak their minds.

As Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown debate face-to-face on “Donahue,” as Ross Perot flirts with candidacy on “Larry King Live,” there’s a tinge of horror in mainstream reporting about the alleged “new media.” But there’s nothing terribly new here.

Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan all perched on Johnny Carson’s couch. When Clinton courts the youth vote on MTV, he’s harking back to Fiorello LaGuardia, who transfixed kids during a New York newspaper strike by reading comics on radio.

If there’s more of this straying from the usual in 1992, perhaps it’s because the usual lines of communication are failing voters and aspirants alike. The average evening newscast’s candidate sound-bite has shrunk to under eight seconds this year, according to Harvard’s Center for Media and Public Affairs. Those newscasts are a rapid-fire amalgam of video snippets, factoids, swirling graphics and thumpy music, machine-gunned at viewers in the feverish hope of deterring channel-hopping. The men who anchor these shows are remote, wealthy superstars.

The Establishment media is also preoccupied with the easy lead: poll results, character assessment, campaign handicapping, charge and countercharge. Talk-show callers ask a simpler sort of question. When Pat Buchanan did “Larry King Live” last December, San Antonio wondered where he’d find the money to help the homeless and mentally ill. When Perot appeared April 16, South Africa wanted to know if he’d support the transition to black rule. And on June 18, Guadalajara asked Clinton what he thought of the proposed free-trade treaty.

Fair questions all, from regular folks.

And when candidates sit still to answer them, they get closer to the people they bid to govern. A live talk show is not a bad measure of character. Fielding a curve from a citizen in Kirksville, Mo., is just as valid a test as going mano a mano with Dan Rather. On a talk show, a candidate has to think on his feet. There are worse ways of seeing whether a man or woman is up to the job.

One of these worse ways is the quadrennial endurance contest cherished and romanticized by the Establishment media: the nonstop, time-zones-be-damned, hell-for-leather campaign barnstorm. This numbing ritual, fiercely protected by the candidate-victim’s airborne and likewise imprisoned chroniclers, does have a rich history: Substitute a Boeing 737 for the steam train, a laptop for the Morse sender, and not much has changed in the last hundred years. (Although the speed of jet travel means everyone’s stamina crumbles that much faster; as these Bataan death marches wind down, the exhausted candidate and the haggard press eye one another warily, each waiting for the other to crack up.) What traits do we thus gauge? The ability to stay up for days? To make a stale stump speech sound forever fresh? To subsist on airplane food? What does any of this have to do with running the country? A President need not necessarily be able to win a shouting contest and sleep deprivation experiment staged at airports from Bakersfield to Bangor. He or she does need to be able to talk on television. Talk shows may be the logical successor to the cross-country hustle. Voters get a better view; there’s guaranteed substantive discussion and a lot less airplane fuel is wasted.

Expose a candidate to the public again and again via talk shows, question-and-answer forums, and all the other “unorthodox” vehicles under scrutiny this year, and a clearer, more complete portrait emerges.

Talk shows won’t replace traditional journalistic inquiry; not only will the journalists themselves see to that, but there will always be a safe niche in the business for adversarial interlocution. Talk shows complement hard-news productions. They flesh out. They let you see how a person who seeks to lead reacts to a joke, a flub, a plea, a charge from left field, a simple question.

Most television demands nothing from its audience, indeed, caters to viewers’ passive instincts. But that telephone number we flash on-screen is anyone’s ticket to jump in and direct the national debate, if for only a second. In a society where the levers of power seem ever more remote, whose citizens are ever more demoralized, we offer an antidote.