MEDIA WATCH / Focus on Campaign Coverage : Press Offers a Preview of Its Focus for Fall : Media: Despite vows of more substantive political coverage, reports rely on atmosphere over issues.

From Bill and Al’s excellent adventure to rumors about Dan Quayle’s future, this week in politics has offered a likely preview of what the presidential derby will look like this fall through the lens of the press.

Despite earlier vows to refocus coverage of the campaign this year, this week the press:

* Made much of polls that both campaigns say are not reliable predictors of general election sentiment.

* Proved unable to resist the pretty pictures and zinging sound bites from the bus tour of Democratic nominee Bill Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore.

* Devoted considerable time and prominent display to stories about internal strategy and a series of rumors about troubles in President Bush’s campaign.

The result was a week in which politics dominated the media agenda, although the content did not contain much discussion of the nation’s problems.

The chief beneficiary was Clinton. His strategists were so delighted with how things went that they are planning another bus trip for the fall. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” one Clinton aide told NBC News.

Of course, the bus tour, the polls, and the crisis in the Bush camp were all legitimate news. But before the campaign began, many in the press vowed not to overemphasize atmospherics at the expense of focusing on the broader concerns that usually decide elections.

“We are back to ground zero again,” said Larry Sabato, the author of “Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics.”

“Everything this week was the same as four years ago, except it was the Democrats selling sound bites and photo ops and the Republicans having to deal with unsubstantiated rumors,” he said.

The week began with the “bounce” in the polls that Clinton got after the Democratic convention, which ranged from a 29-point Clinton lead in the Washington Post to 20 points in the Los Angeles Times.

The size of the “bounce” surprised many newspeople. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post all played the polls as Page 1 news. Even ABC’s “World News Tonight,” which except for one other day had refused to lead with polls, led with one this time.

But both Bush and Clinton advisers agreed that these numbers were all but useless for measuring where the race would be next fall.

“These are souffle polls, full of hot air,” said Clinton strategist James Carville.

Yet the polls seemed to influence not only voters greeting Clinton’s bus tour but also the tone of reporters covering it.

“You are riding an unbelievable crest of popularity,” Harry Smith said by way of grilling Clinton on the CBS program “This Morning.” “How do you account for it?”

“What is it,” was NBC’s Bryant Gumbel’s tough question to Clinton the same day, “that people are responding to as they cheer (you) on this trip?”

Before the campaign began, television journalists had said that they had allowed themselves to be too easily manipulated during the Ronald Reagan Administration into simply airing the pictures that politicians staged for them.

This week’s coverage suggested that although they are trying to change, the networks have not yet perfected a way to resist such pictures.

On CBS this week, for instance, Richard Threlkeld alerted viewers that Clinton was trying to draw comparisons to John F. Kennedy. But that warning against the Clinton strategy was overwhelmed by the pictures CBS showed: Clinton standing next to Kennedy statues, a film clip of Kennedy and an admiring female voter talking about how much the Arkansas governor resembled the martyred President.

CBS also has instituted a new policy of trying to make every sound bite 30 seconds long, four times the length of the average sound bite this year. The policy has

resulted in CBS communicating more of what candidates are really like, said media analyst Kathleen Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania,

But the immediate impact this week was that Clinton’s attack on Bush Wednesday went on a good deal longer on CBS than on ABC or NBC, and Bush’s refusal to discuss rumors about him or Dan Quayle dropping out of the race lasted half a minute.

NBC also tried to move beyond the pictures, devoting its political segment on Monday to a discussion of the economy as an issue, trying to fit the Clinton bus tour into that framework.

Another revealing preview of the fall is how the Bush campaign organized itself to react to the Clinton bus tour. Quayle set up satellite interviews with local news stations in many of the cities where Clinton’s bus tour was stopping, offering critiques and criticism of the Democratic plan. By week’s end, Clinton was spending more time responding to Republican attacks.

Meanwhile, most of the week the major newspapers in the country were focusing on disarray in the Bush campaign and on when Secretary of State James A. Baker III would return to rescue the campaign.

The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post all published stories about rumors that Bush might drop out of the race because of illness, or that Quayle might drop out of the race because Baker disliked him.

The lead story in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday was headlined “How the Political Pros Figure the Equation of Dumping Quayle.” The top political story in the Washington Post was “Bush Seeks to Dispel ‘Crazy Rumors.’ ” The lead story in the New York Times was “Bush Is Adamant on Keeping Quayle: A Flurry of Speculation.”

While this reflects what was occurring in Washington this week, ultimately, said Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess, “most of what the national political press corps is focusing on is very marginal in terms of being important to voters or determining the election.”

One bit of journalism this week has stood out, though, in the minds of several press critics. The New York Times’ Andrew Rosenthal has spent time analyzing the veracity of what the political combatants are saying about each other. On Tuesday, he wrote that Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) had lied about Clinton’s proposals regarding homosexuals, and on Thursday he wrote that several of Bush’s criticisms of Clinton were misleading.

According to Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, experience suggests that this kind of information is not only useful to voters trying to sort out the truth, but it also provides “a disincentive to those politicians who overstep the boundaries of honesty and fairness.”