Struggle for TV Time Forces Candidates to Switch Tactics

Getting elected President is harder now than when Ronald Reagan perfected the art of staging events and sound bites for TV.

After more than a decade of feeling they have been used by politicians, the media--particularly the four networks--are endeavoring to just say no to made-for-TV “photo ops.” And they are attempting to spend more time instead analyzing policy positions and the candidates’ veracity.

All too aware--and angry--about what is occurring, the candidates are already changing the way they campaign.

When Bill Clinton delivered a major speech on welfare recently, aides also arranged to release a TV advertisement on the same subject that day because they feared that otherwise the networks might not carry his message. Yet even that plan did not work. The networks mostly ignored the speech and the ad. NBC, for its part, decided to compare Clinton’s welfare proposals to Bush’s and found both lacking.

When George Bush flew to Detroit recently to unveil his economic plan--his “agenda for American renewal”--he went to even greater lengths to get television to convey his message, convinced that the press would not do it for him.

His campaign spent $1 million to buy five minutes of national TV time that night to reprise the speech. He taped additional comments exclusively for local news stations around the country. And campaign aides taped interviews with dozens of local business leaders praising the speech and sent them out via satellite to their hometown stations.

The results were mixed. While ABC offered a straightforward account of the speech, CBS laced its coverage heavily with political analysis and NBC spent most of its time describing the plan as falling far short of its goals.

Some network journalists contend that raising the threshold of what gets on the air is forcing the campaigns to be more substantive. Campaign officials say the new style is just more journalistic impudence.

“I think it is reflective of an extraordinary degree of arrogance that the networks believe what they think is going on in America should be heard rather than what the individuals who are running for President are saying,” said James Lake, deputy Bush campaign manager. “But having said that, we have to figure out how to go around that arrogance.”

Members of the Clinton team seem more resigned. One key Clinton strategist said the campaign now is “looking for a multiplier effect” every time an event is planned--combining speeches with ads on the same day, for instance--to make the networks consider the message to be more newsworthy.

Political insiders agree that if the presidential race ends up being close, the difference between winning and losing revolves around which campaign best adapts to the change in the media. After all, in the age of television, a key task in winning the White House has involved learning how the media behaves and then using that to control coverage.

In 1976, for instance, Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination in part because he learned to manipulate media perceptions about who had momentum. In 1980 and 1984, the Reagan campaign learned to control network newscasts by mastering the practice of staging pictures that visually reinforced his words.

In 1988, Bush ran on symbolic issues--like the pledge of allegiance--that were ideal for television because they could be matched with photogenic scenes--such as schoolchildren saluting the flag--and did not require complex explanations.

As the 1992 campaign began, the press vowed to do things differently. In part, journalists in both print and broadcast were influenced by criticism that the media bore some blame for the failure in 1988 to squarely address the nation’s most pressing issues and for allowing candidates to make charges that distorted the truth.

Al Hunt, the Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, called the networks “video nymphomaniacs,” unable to resist airing the pretty pictures that candidates arranged, even if they knew the pictures contradicted the facts.

In 1990, the Washington bureau chief of NBC, Timothy J. Russert, called on the networks to use the daily stump appearances as an introduction to examine a candidates’ record. David Broder, the veteran political correspondent for the Washington Post, urged the media to press candidates on the issues voters cared most about. Others proposed more aggressive policing of claims made in advertising.

As the primaries progressed, these efforts seemed halting at best. A study conducted by the Shorenstein Barone Center at Harvard concluded that through June, the candidates still largely controlled the pictures that the networks were airing.

But since the general election campaign entered its last leg after Labor Day, the intentions and suggestions expressed last winter seemed to have come to the forefront again.

Two weeks ago, ABC anchorman Peter Jennings revealed that his network was taking the most aggressive position to date.

“We’re aware that a lot of you are turned off by the political process and that many of you put at least some of the blame on us,” Jennings announced on the air. As a result, he said, ABC planned to “only devote time to a candidate’s daily routine if it is more than routine. There will be less attention to staged appearances and sound bites designed exclusively for television.”

Instead, the network aimed to focus on how the campaign is being fought and how the candidates respond to issues that voters have told ABC are most important.

Through Election Day, the network intends to devote its long American Agenda segment each night--about 20% of its 30-minute evening news broadcast--to the candidates’ records and ideas on specific issues.

Jennings will also conduct focus groups with undecided voters that will take the program to different battleground communities and air at length.

The idea, the brainchild of Jennings and executive producer Paul Friedman, amounts to the most aggressive approach any of the evening newscasts has adopted in covering politics. It builds on the approach of Russert and political editor William Wheatley at NBC.

A week after the ABC plan was announced, CBS said it, too, would begin taking its show on the road each Friday to talk to voters.

CNN has tended to be the most conventional in its coverage to date, but it also has been the most copious. And later this month, it will launch a series called “Democracy in America” that is to examine and compare the candidates background, records and proposals.

The effects of these coverage changes already have altered the landscape of the general election campaign.

Although political operatives in both parties grumble in public, privately some concede the networks are becoming “more sophisticated” after years of being surprisingly naive about how easily their medium could be manipulated.

Yet, much as network officials thought they would, the campaigns also are already adapting to find ways to again assume more control of the news, including spending more time concentrating on getting their message on local news.

The Clinton campaign, for instance, has changed the workings of its field operation from something traditionally designed to keep track of potential voters to one that also seeks to stage events for local television.

Clinton aides say the higher threshold for getting their message on the networks is the reason that twice in the last few weeks they have tried to use the release of TV commercials to complement campaign appearances.

Four years ago, campaigns often tried to release TV ads in secret to avoid allowing the opposition to react.

The campaign also now alerts Democrats in Congress each morning as to what Clinton will be saying that day so that those officials might go before the cameras on the House and Senate floor to reinforce that message. The hope is that TV stations back home will pick up the comments by their local politicians, thus echoing the national campaign.

The Republicans have taken to reinforcing Bush’s appearances by buying their own satellite time to transmit recorded messages from local politicians and surrogates. They fax to 675 local TV stations around the nation the information needed for the media outlets to receive these party-controlled messages off the satellite.

The GOP recently researched whether local stations in 20 key markets aired the responses by local Republican politicians that had been prepared and sent via satellite during the Democratic Convention in July. The party discovered that the counterattacks were widely used.

Nor has the GOP given up trying to steer network coverage. When Bush gave his major economic speech in Detroit, the White House deputy chief of staff and the press secretary, who rarely travel on the press plane, accompanied reporters to emphasize how important they thought the President’s remarks were.

“For days, they told us what they were going to tell us, then they told us, then they briefed us to tell us what they just told us,” ABC’s Ann Compton quipped.

The campaign, still uncertain the networks would convey the message, bought its five-minute commercial, something it never did in 1988.

Political strategists from both parties argue that the media has no right to try to set the campaign’s agenda through what it chooses to cover and not cover.

But Russert of NBC argues that this year’s efforts have raised the level of the campaign dialogue. “Every day we are receiving faxes with documentary evidence to back up their claims, background material, Op-Ed pieces. They are trying to inundate us with substance, because they know (photo opportunities) no longer guarantees them access to the nightly news.”

In no small part, the struggle between the campaigns and the networks is rooted in the changing logistics and economics of television. In the past, campaigns could sway national television coverage by announcing in advance that they wanted to deliver a major speech on a certain day.

The networks would dispatch an editor to that city--along with 1,200 pounds of editing equipment--plus producers, camera crews and one or two correspondents.

Even when the speech proved to be empty rhetoric, the networks already were committed to the assignment and the campaign usually got the coverage it coveted.

Now the networks protect themselves from such a trap--and not insignificantly save money--by keeping people off the campaign bus.

When Bush delivered his major speech in Detroit, CBS correspondent Susan Spencer and NBC correspondent John Cochran stayed in Washington to do the story. None of the three broadcast networks sent editors into the field, using the CNN pool equipment instead to feed their footage back to Washington, where the stories were edited and produced.

Only ABC had its nightly news correspondent, Brit Hume, with the President.

The change in network tactics similarly has made it more difficult for candidates to soft-pedal some aspects of their message by staging certain events away from the network cameras. Earlier this month, for instance, Bush spoke to Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition late on a Friday night. In the past, whatever campaigning a candidate did late in the day, after deadlines for the networks, usually escaped national television attention.

But CBS and NBC, rather than feature the more innocuous Bush events earlier in the day, used that night’s appearance with Robertson to examine the Christian right’s sway over the GOP. And Clinton, anticipating this might happen, deftly changed a speech he gave that day about public service at Notre Dame to a call for tolerance on morals and family values. It proved to be one of Clinton’s most successful moments on the network news in weeks.