What’s a Couple of Hours?

Bashing what little remains of coverage of presidential elections by commercial television appears to be the current sport of choice among many media mavens and political pundits, who dismiss such efforts as a waste of viewers’ time.

Even before President Clinton and Republican nominee Bob Dole met in the first of their two scheduled TV debates of 1996, Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg weighed in with the opinion that such debates “are the ultimate fiction and the biggest redundancy of presidential campaigns” (“Are Debates Necessary? That’s, Well, Debatable,” Calendar, Oct. 4).

Not long ago, both the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions were almost universally jeered by the critics as scripted farce. Of course they were. What else could be expected when the TV networks, one presidential election after another, vowed to cut down the hours of coverage “next time”--and did.

So the ultimate arrived this year--one hour of air time for four nights for each convention. (Wow! One whole hour! How could they be so generous?) Faced with this schedule, convention managers cunningly produced tight one-hour shows cramming in all the self-serving glitz and pizazz they could in 60 minutes.

Mind you, the networks’ alternative to sacrificing that precious hour in most cases was another 60 minutes of summer reruns--only slightly more dreary than some of those shows were when they ran the first time.

As the conventions in Chicago and San Diego mercifully faded to black, the cry arose: Abolish the conventions altogether! After all, television and the primary elections have effectively taken over the role once played by political parties, and presidential nominees are often chosen before the convention anyway. So dump these boring political shows, and save network moguls the agony of having to decide whether to give conventions even less than four hours in the year 2000, or not cover them at all.

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What’s the choice? Rosenberg says it’s PBS, which broadcast a two-hour “Frontline” documentary on the Clinton-Dole contest--drawing probably 5% to 7% of the audience. The first “official” presidential debate in Hartford on Oct. 6 attracted a mere one-third of the nation’s TV households on all the channels combined, not enough to qualify as a blockbuster.

What’s wrong with asking commercial TV to serve “only” one-third of the audience, even granting that presidential debates don’t answer all the questions and conventions are self-serving? Even with the minimum coverage now available, people can learn something about who will run their government.

Unless they don’t want to learn, which is an even sadder story but not surprising in view of the way commercial TV has systematically and cynically dumbed down the American audience over the past generation. (Murder, rape, car chases, blood and gore, mayhem, Yes; Political conventions, No.)

Come on. Is four hours every four years too much? Two debates every four years, too much? Gimme a break!