Changing Pack Rides the 2000 Campaign Trail

In a sign of the rearranging TV news landscape, the Boys (and Girls) on the Bus this campaign season often haven’t included reporters from CBS News. It is in sharp contrast to past years when the network dedicated major resources--and by far the most air time among the three major broadcast networks--to the unfolding political story.

The buzz among rival news organizations massed in New Hampshire for the recent presidential primary race focused on the low profile the venerable news organization is keeping thus far this election year.

Some of that is relative: With three 24-hour cable news networks (CNN, NBC’s MSNBC and Fox News Channel) for the first time all vying for viewers’ and candidates’ attention, the broadcast network coverage, on both CBS and ABC, seems diminished. With time to fill, the cable networks have all aired numerous candidate debates, establishing themselves early in the game as the place to go for political coverage; CBS’ Dan Rather, without a cable outlet, is the sole anchor not to have moderated a debate. (ABC’s Peter Jennings moderated one that aired on MSNBC, with excerpts on ABC’s “Nightline.”)

But other choices have been deliberate. CBS took a third fewer people to Manchester this year than four years ago when the contests were less heated; reporters and producers for other news outlets say CBS has been notably missing on the campaign buses, the traditional way of following candidates. “I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen them show up,” says a producer for another network who has been tracking a major candidate. “They haven’t been on the bus.”

Until late this week, CBS was alone among major TV news outlets in not assigning individual reporters to cover individual candidates, relying instead on a rotating group of veteran campaign correspondents, as well as “pool” reports that it shares with ABC News and the Fox News Channel (both ABC and Fox have nonetheless assigned correspondents to each of the four major candidates).

And unlike at this point during the 1988, 1992 and 1996 campaigns, the “CBS Evening News” is no longer the leader in the amount of time dedicated to campaign coverage, according to statistics compiled by Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which monitors network newscasts. That distinction now falls to “NBC Nightly News”; CBS is second in total air time dedicated to the campaign since Labor Day. ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the only network not to air an extended prime-time report on the New Hampshire primary (its coverage aired in the late-night “Nightline”), is a distant third.

How the early choices CBS has made will affect the way in which viewers regard its political coverage remains to be seen.

CBS News strongly defends its coverage, noting that to focus on the evening newscast ignores the campaign coverage during “The Early Show” and the candidate interviews that have aired during “60 Minutes II.” The coverage is “as aggressive and competitive as anyone else’s,” says Al Ortiz, who oversees CBS’ campaign coverage. “We haven’t married up a correspondent per candidate, because that’s not a very smart way of covering the story,” he says. “We’ve certainly always intended to hit the campaign hard as it heated up, and the groundwork we’ve laid going into this year is sound and smart; we’re not blowing out of proportion things early in the process that don’t have that much affect on the race.”

As for the debates, he said, “it’s very, very early in the process for us and for our national network broadcast audience. For us to put a debate on the network schedule is a very high-stakes decision. We’re looking at possible scenarios down the road.”

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CBS says it is relying on a group of seasoned political reporters for its coverage. The lack of specific assignments to date has given CBS more flexibility “to go where the story is,” says a spokeswoman, as well as an opportunity to bring more reporters into the mix.

“You don’t need to be on the bus every day to know what is going on inside a campaign,” says Lane Venardos, who just retired from CBS but is consulting on this year’s election coverage, which he has overseen in the past.

NBC so far has the most coverage, Tyndall notes, because it includes features about, say, candidates’ wives in addition to its hard-news campaign coverage. ABC, he notes, is the only broadcaster doing it “the old-fashioned way,” with correspondents assigned to all four major candidates and off-air reporters assigned to the rest. CBS, he notes, “is doing neither,” concentrating instead on “the horse race.”

Despite CBS’ diminished presence on the bus, Rather kept a grueling pace Tuesday night, doing five live updates of the “CBS Evening News” for various time zones, special reports and 20 minutes of election coverage during the newsmagazine “60 Minutes II.” The newsmagazine had originally scheduled just a third of that amount of time to the story, but expanded its time as the magnitude of the story grew.