Only 4 Years to Gear Up for ’96 Coverage

There’s a tendency for the news media to relax and kick back after a bruising election. This is no time for napping, however.

With only four years separating us from the next presidential election, the networks should immediately evaluate their 1992 coverage with an eye toward revamping for the next campaign.

Change is definitely needed, and here are some suggestions:

* Initiate “Rapping With Ross”: This is on the level. Redefining “telegenic,” Ross Perot showed how effective he can be in front of a camera. Thus, he’s a television resource who should not be squandered merely because he wasn’t elected President. One of the networks should let him host his own interview program throughout the 1996 campaign.

Considering his ability to hone in on issues and knife through baloney--to say nothing of delivering twanging one-liners--he’d be extraordinary. If he runs out of candidates and other political types to question, he could always grill members of the media. Would that be a kick or what? As a bonus, he could even bring along his charts.

Of course, this would be predicated on Perot not running for office himself in 1996. Given a choice between being interviewed as a candidate and interviewing others, however, there’s little doubt--given his combativeness with most of the media--that he’d prefer the latter.

Perot is a natural, instinctive interviewer, affirmed by the way he attaches question marks even to sentences that aren’t questions, like this one?

I rest my case?

* Be rude to evasive candidates. Even if one of them is the President.

President Bush is a master of folksy obfuscation. So, too, is Bill Clinton a slippery character when it comes to dodging tough questions. Both displayed these skills during the campaign, exploiting the fact that many TV interviewers are deferential toward persons in authority, rarely protesting when their questions are finessed or unanswered. They fear offending the public by appearing to be bullies. And they confuse respect for the President as a person with respect for the office.

It was ABC’s good old Sam Donaldson--raising rudeness to a journalistic art--who peppered Bush and Clinton with questions in the waning days of the campaign, fearlessly interrupting them, especially Clinton, in mid-filibuster.

Rudeness can pay. Sometimes, it’s the only way.

* End live network coverage of the political conventions. Yes, that should include even CNN, which in the past has used its format--it’s a 24-hour-a-day news network--to justify overcoverage.

Baloney. Let C-SPAN, which offers pure coverage minus commentary, be the TV of record when it comes to covering the conventions.

The news media, especially television, were charged by the Bush campaign with savaging the Republican National Convention after giving positive coverage to the Democratic National Convention, and it’s true that the coverage was unbalanced. TV harped on the Democrats--and we’re speaking mainly of pundits here--only when the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former California Gov. Jerry Brown seemed to balk at endorsing the Clinton-Gore ticket. That coverage contrasted to the general pasting, at least in terms of media emphasis, that the Republicans took when they approved a conservative platform and granted Pat Buchanan and others quality TV time for speeches that listed to the far right.

Why this media focus? The reason wasn’t ideological. Instead, the notion of the GOP paying such homage to ultra-conservative philosophies seemed to be more significant than Jackson and Brown’s estrangement.

The broader question was why television was at either convention in such force in the first place, given that these events are, virtually by definition, nothing more than tailored-for-TV commercials for their respective political parties.

Once committed to large blocks of coverage (CNN’s being by far the largest), the networks as always found themselves with time on their hands and little to report. Like children, they inevitably got into mischief. That included pumping minuscule stories with hyperbole to the extent that they became Goodyear blimps, and filling time by deploying those reliable talking tongues, the pundits. Confronted by the convention’s right-wing tilt, the tongues wagged wickedly.

Would some of these political speeches even have been made had not the cameras been there to carry them live? To the extent that they were significant, moreover, couldn’t they have been covered as spot news instead of being part of an orgy of overcoverage?

The networks should be in place at the conventions in case any legitimate news develops. But they shouldn’t obligate themselves in advance--constructing vast electronic cities at the various convention sites--to cover extensive portions of them just because they’ve always done so in the past.

* Improve coverage of minor party candidates. Except for Perot, they were virtually ignored, meaning that the ideas they espoused were also snubbed.

When the subject of debates comes up in 1996, the networks should lobby the major party candidates to include their lesser-known counterparts in at least one of these televised forums.

The notion that minor party candidates would somehow dilute the process is preposterous. The purpose of these events should be to widen our vision of the nation’s potential, not limit it. It’s just possible that we might learn something. If nothing else, Perot proved in 1992 that alternative ideas should be a part of America’s political dialogue.

* Ban professional spin doctors from the airwaves. These propagandists never depart from their narrow political agendas. They contribute nothing but clutter, and TV should not be a litterbug.