Just Another TV News Job Now

When Tom Brokaw was a 20-year-old college student, flailing about, trying to figure out what to do with his life, he tuned into the 1960 political conventions on television, and suddenly he knew: “I decided there was no better job in the world than being a convention floor reporter.”

The job became his “guiding star,” he says, and by 1968 he was at the conventions, although it took him until 1976 to get one of the coveted floor posts for NBC.

Those were the days when the broadcasts could go on indefinitely, into the wee hours of the morning, if that’s how long it took to settle on a candidate or a platform stand. And the job didn’t disappoint, even in 1972, when as a low-level reporter Brokaw was just trying to find information for other correspondents to deliver on air: “I had the California delegation really wired, and I was feeding up stuff to [John] Chancellor and [David] Brinkley in the booth; David was very generous in giving me credit--and I was having the time of my life, getting out on the floor and running around. It was a real intersection of American life and the political system.”

Say goodbye to all that.

Network reporters will still be running around the floor when the Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in Philadelphia, and later when the Democrats gather in Los Angeles, but there will be a lot fewer of them per network, a measly two, in fact, for CBS News. They’ll elbow for space and a clear camera sight line, but will mostly have to look on enviously, dreaming of past glory days, as their far more numerous colleagues from the cable news networks get all the air time and Web sites get all the attention. Unless they are at NBC, which also owns cable channel MSNBC, the big network stars will be forced to vie to squeeze themselves into the single hour most broadcasters have allotted to each night of the events. “Peter [Jennings] will take 75% of the time and the rest of it will be divided up among all 500 of us,” ABC’s Sam Donaldson quips.

As for the skills that were required of floor reporters in their heyday, they are largely anachronistic. Canvass members of a delegation on which candidate they plan to throw their votes behind? That’s a skill honed by an entire generation of television reporters that most likely will never be called for again.

Tomorrow’s news stars will have to hope for perhaps a war with which to make their mark, instead of the convention post that had been an obligatory stop on the way up the ladder.

Donaldson’s first convention floor job was in 1964. He gleefully recounts the time in 1976 that he had to hide under some Republican delegates’ legs when officials attempted to clear the aisles, so fearful was he of missing an important vote, and the time in 1996 when he stood on a wall to keep up with Bob Dole, only to have the crowd below start yelling, “Jump!” But he likens the skills he learned to growing alfalfa. “The knowledge is only useful as long as you can put it to use and need to put it to use. I know how to plant alfalfa, how to cut it and bale it so it won’t mold. But that’s really only useful if I’m going to plant more alfalfa.”

CBS anchor Dan Rather, whose convention experience goes all the way back to 1956 and who can match

Donaldson story for story, prefers another analogy. “Reporters in the context of conventions are like blacksmiths. There’s very little call for people who can shoe horses anymore.”

Of course, it’s the networks’ own decisions not to cover the nominating conventions gavel-to-gavel; they could be there, if they wanted to, as PBS’ “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” will be, along with MSNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and C-SPAN. And they will be there on Thursday night, when the presidential candidates make their acceptance speeches.

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In the early days, conventions and the networks had a “truly symbiotic relationship: They made the network news divisions what they are, and the networks took the process into the people’s living rooms, where they had never been before,” says Brokaw. They provided memorable moments for viewers too: Chancellor being dragged off the floor by security guards at the 1964 GOP convention, with his classic line, “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.” The cameras were there in 1968 for the Chicago riots and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s rants. Even as late as 1992, Pat Buchanan’s uprising gave surprising drama to the Republican event.

But even Rather, who in August 1988 wrote a guest column in Newsweek magazine lambasting ABC News President Roone Arledge for suggesting that conventions were losing their news value, has a hard time getting worked up about the cutbacks this year.

Then, Rather argued that “some things in television are more important than ratings, even more important than money,” and that “a nationwide network has national responsibilities. Canceling or even truncating convention coverage is a bad idea.” Unfortunately, he says now, “I was caught defending the old order.”

He says he fought this time around for CBS to have more of a presence at the conventions than the planned allotment of between three and five prime-time hours each gathering, but, he says, “it wasn’t a very good argument.”

“The people at CBS,” he says, “want to be responsible citizens, and we’re sensitive to our reputation for news. But the question they put to me at every turn was: ‘At the conventions, what’s the news?’ Long pause.”

So instead, on Monday and Tuesday nights (referred to by some CBS wags as “lost Tuesday” for its lack of seemingly interesting news), CBS will slip convention reports into its standard newsmagazines “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes II.” If the events get boring--and Rather says the party schedules so far are “a prescription for narcolepsy”--the network will cut away, to, of all things, reruns of previous newsmagazine stories, which network executives are convinced will be more popular with viewers than live convention coverage.

Rather and his rivals blame the parties for taking the news out of the conventions, instead scripting them minute by minute, leaving no surprises, to the point where they have become infomercials for the candidates and their platforms.

“The parties see these as promotional sale devices for the candidates. Why we should throw in with them anymore than we throw in with any sales campaign is beyond me,” says Donaldson.

“Those of us who cover this stuff, especially myself, I think we just thought this was a quintessentially wonderful ad for American democracy and it isn’t anymore,” says ABC’s Jennings, who is Canadian. “I used to get all teary at conventions. I feel sad whenever I think we’ve been robbed of that, but it wasn’t us that did it.”

Nonetheless, the broadcasters don’t want to cede the entire news audience to the cable networks, for fear of losing those viewers for good. And they watch carefully what their rivals do, so as not to be all alone when the finger-pointing starts that they are being anti-civic-minded. In recent years, right up until the conventions’ start, the parties and the networks have played a big game of high-stakes chicken over just how much of the parties’ parties would make it on the broadcasts: The networks threaten to cut back to almost nothing; the politicians hold out inducements to get the networks to commit to more time.

Recently, ABC said it would actually add an extra hour to each convention’s coverage, asking the National Football League to move the start time of a game to accommodate the switch, when it became clear that the network was going to miss out on President Clinton’s speech to the Democrats otherwise.

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Still, some moves backfire. Jennings says he was surprised to hear that the Republicans plan to extend the traditional roll call of the states, always a big television draw, over three nights instead of one, as a way to draw more network attention. “If ever there was an indication from the parties that this is a show, that is the ultimate metaphor,” he says. “That leaves us comfortably where we are. They’ll do their show, and we’ll do our broadcast,” using the conventions as a jumping-off point to examine issues.

For all the objections that the networks raise, some might ask,

why cover the conventions at all? The cable networks will send cameras into enough nooks and crannies to satisfy even the biggest political junkie, and public television will have it covered for the one-fourth of the country that can’t or doesn’t subscribe to cable or satellite services. Fox’s broadcast network is shunning the conventions completely, as will the WB and UPN; ABC, CBS and NBC seemingly could too.

“It’s the national forum for the nomination of the two most important offices we have in the land,” says Brokaw. “However orchestrated it may be, it is a forum for the discussion of the issues before the country. It’s worthwhile, but not worthy of wall-to-wall.”

So the networks will be there, but with a twinge of nostalgia. “Can we go to dinner? Is there a party? Sure,” says Donaldson. “But the fun of covering a big story is chasing important people, getting comments, learning who the vice presidential candidates are. Will I miss it? A little bit, sure.”

Donaldson is luckier than most: As a new-media pioneer, of sorts, anchoring his own daily news broadcast on abcnews.com, he gets to do a hefty chunk of the convention coverage for the ABC Web site. “I’ll be Mr. Dot-Com, at 7, for a half-hour, and then after Peter signs off at 11, I’ll come back on the Web and do a wrap-up. I’ll do for the Web what I used to do for commercial television. At least I’ll have the freedom to do it. There’s no other show on after me, so I’ll just patter on.”

But even though the Net “does provide for a measure of interactivity, it doesn’t compare to television, we all know that,” Jennings acknowledges.

For some nostalgic viewers, an integral part of past convention experiences, at least as they were seen on TV, will be lost: the instant history lessons that the network anchors and correspondents imparted, drawing on their own attendance at the conventions over the years, as they vamped to fill hours of air time. Jennings sees it slightly differently: “It isn’t knowing the history, it is the reveling in the process of history which is lost,” he says.

Although many past network stars have migrated to cable, such as Fox News’ Brit Hume, and CNN has been on the air long enough to have minted some history experts of its own, much cable air time ends up being filled by partisan pundits, not the reporters nostalgic over the good old days.

It may not be the way it once was, but the network teams will still feel the adrenaline pumping when they arrive on scene.

“I’ll be there, and standing by for news,” says Rather.

When Jennings thinks of the job ahead and his team of Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, George Stephanopoulos and Michel (McQueen) Martin, he equates it to “driving a team of superb horses. You have to drive them carefully to get the best out of them, get them all pulling together, and when it’s over and you come down from the anchor booth, you want to rub everyone down and say, ‘That was fabulous.’ It’s clearly more difficult to show off all the skills of the staff in an hour,” but he says it can be done.

And, he says: “I know I will get to the convention, and the balloons will be tightly nestled up in the netting and the state signs will be up everywhere and the floor will be replete with the traditional colors and I will say to myself, I know I will, ‘Oh damn,’ because it is exciting.”