TV’s Bumpy Campaign Trail

From Gennifer Flowers to Ross Perot to the most recent disclosures about George Bush’s involvement in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal, the 1992 race for the presidency has not turned out to be the boring campaign that many television executives thought would make for cheap and easy coverage.

When interviewed by TV Times in January, the broadcast networks and CNN seemed to have two major goals: spend less money--CNN was less concerned on that score--and avoid getting caught in the trap of covering shallow, sometimes slimy stories fabricated by the candidates and their campaigns.

But now, with the election just weeks away, the nation faces a broadcast landscape much changed since the campaign began.

Tighter budgets have been stretched even tighter as the campaign swung farther and farther from the boring, one-man race that George Bush’s high post-Gulf War approval ratings indicated this time last year.

And as the networks--meaning ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and CNN--have indeed become tougher in some respects, the candidates have become more wily in their efforts to reach the public.

Today, candidates show up on talk shows, responding to questions from celebrity interviewers as well as voters who call in. With TV news crews set on avoiding photo-opportunities and easy questions, the candidates are buying chunks of commercial time on TV to make their points uninterrupted by journalists.

And to avoid hard questions from network correspondents, Bill Clinton and George Bush are staging photo opportunities for local stations, hoping to get publicity that way.

“Television has assumed a much larger role in this campaign than it ever has before,” said Bill Wheatley, director of political coverage for NBC. “Not only the evening news programs, which have always had a large role, but the morning news programs, some of the talk programs, some of the tabloid programs and even some of the entertainment programs.”

The result has meant, in a play on the cliche, good news and bad news.

“Overall, broadcast journalism did a much better job of making the candidates and their issues accessible to the viewing public,” said Joe Peyronnin, vice president and assistant to the president of CBS News. “If we were still to come up short, it’s still the fact that the candidates have the ability to manipulate and maneuver. And we have to continually remain cynical about, and be very careful about, what we are being told and where the truth is.”

The first sign that the 1992 campaign was not going to be an easy one came in late January, when a sometime-nightclub singer from Arkansas named Gennifer Flowers told the Star supermarket tabloid--for a price--that she had an affair with Clinton.

News organizations--despite their promises to stick to the issues--jumped on the story, and when allegations of an affair by Bush were made in the New York Post, that story made headlines and broadcast reports also.

“I think journalism as a profession fell down in their handling of the Clinton and Bush sex stories,” said ABC political director Hal Bruno, who said that his criticism extended to the print media. “They allowed the New York Post and a supermarket tabloid to set the standard for American journalism, and that’s pretty pathetic.”

The networks did make a point of trying to ferret out the truth in tricky areas: A claim by the Bush campaign that Clinton had raised taxes 128 times was challenged in nightly news stories. CNN assigned reporter Brooks Jackson to cover political advertisements and debunk false claims made by the candidates.

But the candidates had also done their homework. They were better at avoiding reporters they didn’t like and also at evading difficult questions during interviews.

Observers say Vice President Dan Quayle, in particular, appeared to have been well-coached in dealing with the press, and in many a weekend morning show was able to keep the discussion on a track that he, not the moderator or host, had chosen.

Coverage fell down the most, according to CNN political director Tom Hannon, when it came to dealing with sensational accusations of misconduct on the part of a candidate.

“We’re not well-equipped yet to deal with issues like sensational disclosures about candidates’ lives,” Hannon said. “No doubt, a lot of people felt the Gennifer Flowers story was not handled as constructively as it could have been. But I think on balance, we, this year, were much better prepared to deal with the substance of the candidates’ proposals and the substance of issues.”

One element affecting election coverage has been the struggle between entertainment and hard news, which affected the campaign on two fronts.

On one hand, entertainment programs became vehicles for political discussion and persuasion.

Texas billionaire Perot shook up both the campaign and the press--and started the candidate-as-talk-show-guest trend--when he declared during an appearance on CNN’S “Larry King Live” that he would run for president if his name were put on the ballot in all 50 states. And in June, then-Democratic hopeful Bill Clinton went for mass appeal by playing the saxophone on the syndicated program “The Arsenio Hall Show.”

The CBS sitcom “Murphy Brown” became the focus of innumerable news stories after Vice President Dan Quayle criticized it for supposedly diminishing the role of men in parenting, and glamorizing single motherhood. And when the program lashed back at Quayle during its premiere episode this fall, the show itself became a vehicle for political propagandizing.

Entertainment has also affected the news in a different way: Because it is so much more profitable to show entertainment programs--even reruns--than to carry live reports of major political events, ABC, NBC and CBS cut back the time allotted to showing last summer’s political conventions. In an unprecedented move, NBC actually dispatched its political team to PBS, where anchor Tom Brokaw and the network’s top correspondents appeared as part of the convention coverage supplied by the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.”

Still, industry executives insist, they’re doing a better job this time around than they did in 1988.

“People have made a decided effort to look critically at how the campaign is being conducted by both parties, and not be subject to manipulation by the parties,” said Arnold Labaton, executive director of PBS’ election coverage.

“The press is always subject to the issues that come up during the course of the campaign, whether it’s Clinton’s draft history, or Quayle’s draft history or health care,” Labaton said. “Health care may be less compelling to viewers than issues that deal with candidates’ personalities or character, but we’ve tried to deal with all of them.”