Campaign ’96 : MEDIA : From a Warehouse Full of Perspectives Emerges Journalists’ Spin on Debate : A stew of conflicting opinions eventually yields the day-after line--that Clinton won while the GOP whined.

The media create their conventional wisdom like a stew.

A lot of different people and ideas and charges converge--as they did at the Republican presidential forum Thursday night in New Hampshire. The campaign aides try to add their spice to the concoction. The post-event polls begin to trickle in. And voila, the conventional wisdom, or CW as the political junkies know it.

At first, as the debate unfolded, media reaction to it was a muddle. But by the day after, a single view had come to prevail--one that CBS News summarized in its nightly news broadcast Friday. The debate, anchorman Dan Rather said, was “New Hampshire’s version of Snow White and the eight Republican candidates, all of them grumpy.”

As reporters watched the debate from the warehouse holding area that was provided for the media by WMUR-TV in Manchester, they groaned or laughed at various points throughout. Such markers could easily provide clues about how the debate would be analyzed as journalists struggled to compress it into news.

*

“You can’t help but be affected by what’s going on here,” said Jon Margolis, a Chicago Tribune political analyst. “You may not want to be affected by it, but you are.”

“You just admit that nobody knocked your socks off and wait to see the first polls,” said Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal.

A few minutes after the debate ended, a crew from ABC-TV’s “Nightline” interviewed a series of reporters and found a cacophony of competing views. One reporter suggested that Sen. Bob Dole had fared well, another said he lost the debate by not winning it with a knockout. One suggested former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander had looked lame and complaining. Another said he had clearly won points.

One television producer, watching the scene both on television and in the press room, predicted that the media would quickly pick up one “hot” moment. It was when Dole complained about the photos of him being used in the negative ads put out by publisher Steve Forbes. As replacements Dole offered his own family photos including one with his wife, Elizabeth, and his dog, Leader.

*

Indeed, the scene was part of evening television news shows and was featured on the front page of the New York Times, whose lead article was on the debate.

But as reporters and analysts digested the events of the 90-minute campaign confrontation, which involved eight candidates and touched on a series of issues ranging from trade to Social Security, one theme began to dominate in their reports--that the assault of negative television ads had become personal.

By the morning after, political analysts had begun to suggest that the battering the Republican candidates were giving each other was diminishing any potential candidate who emerges from the primary process. And if there was a winner in the debate, it was the man almost certain to be the Democratic nominee, President Clinton.

Curtis Wilkie of the Boston Globe, for example, compared the field of Republicans to “schoolchildren, making petulant complaints.” He likened the event to a 1972 Democratic debate when one fringe candidate brandished a rubber rat that he said was the local newspaper, the Union Leader.

Chicago Tribune writers in Friday’s paper called the debate “one long negative ad,” and a columnist from the Philadelphia Daily News suggested that the candidates “needed a dose of Prozac or a cloud of tear gas” to tone down the encounter.

More sedately, David Broder of the Washington Post called the exchange “entertaining, but probably indecisive.”

By Friday, with polls of viewers beginning to trickle in, a consensus seemed to be growing that Alexander and commentator Patrick J. Buchanan had helped themselves at the session. Dole and Forbes may have stayed steady or even hurt their chances throughout the day.

CNN’s polls among New Hampshire Republicans who viewed the debate showed Buchanan leading the race with 26%, ahead of Dole with 23%, Alexander at 18% and Forbes at 15%. The polls also showed that a third of those interviewed felt that their view of Alexander had “improved” because of the debate.

*

But almost 24 hours later, the networks were still focusing on the “bloodletting,” as ABC-TV correspondent Jim Wooten called the debate. And Wooten, like other political experts, worried that the real loser in such sessions would not be the losing candidates in Tuesday’s primary, but the electorate that was being turned off by the fray.

As he stood in the latest snowstorm, Wooten asked, “Is this any way to pick a president?”