How Close to Reality?

The TV men covering the Los Angeles convention created "ugly chaos where nothing was visible except their own drawn, pale, bleating faces." complained The New Yorker last week. As the sessions wore on, the reporters "became increasingly clownish, aggressive, sarcastic and self-important. The harassment of the politicians reached an obscene pitch."

The New York Daily News echoed the complaint, but partly blamed the politicians themselves, who constantly played up to TV. It probably was not worth it, the News suggested. Between 14 and 15 million people watched each convention, an impressive audience for TV, but small compared with "U.S. newspapers' total circulation, which at last report was 58 million copies and still going up."

Such complaints may be unduly crotchety: TV unquestionably provided memorable and sometimes brilliant convention coverage. But it also raised serious doubts about the medium's ways and values in the face of big news.

Bonus for Scoops. Clearly outpaced in performance and ratings by NBC at Los Angeles, CBS pulled out all stops to recoup in Chicago. Its oracles tried to capture some of the colloquial ease that made NBC's Huntley and Brinkley outstanding; when President Eisenhower entered the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, his face spattered with confetti, Ed Murrow observed: "It looks like the President is trying to blast his way out of a sand trap." But Murrow as a humorist simply was not convincing. CBS also threw in extra cameras, rigged up arc lights, offered its reporters bonuses for scoops. When Vice President Nixon arrived at O'Hare International Airport, a Jeep-borne camera broke through the crowd; when President Eisenhower landed, a cagey CBS reporter persuaded Chicago Manufacturer William Rentschler, chairman of "Thank You Ike Day," to wear a microphone under his tie, and CBS picked up the words of Ike's greeting to the welcoming committee ("I know this must be taking a lot of time and effort").

But NBC did better than hold its own, with an exclusive of Ike at the Morrison Hotel breakfast and a fascinating scene in which Nixon and Rockefeller met for the first time in Chicago, Rocky wearing a Nixon button as big as his smile, patting "Dick" on the back with college-reunion gusto and proclaiming that "it will be a pleasure" to campaign for him. "If this isn't love, it'll have to do until the real thing comes along," observed Brinkley to Huntley. Once again NBC clearly outperformed CBS, and the ratings proved it; of the 14 million viewers who saw the Chicago convention, 7,000,000 watched NBC, 5,000,000 CBS and 2,000,000 ABC.

What the Eye Sees. In sum, television was at its best covering the few worthwhile speeches in the heat of their delivery; the faces of big and little politicians with their masks down; and some great human interest moments, as when Senator Barry Goldwater's teen-age daughter leaned out of her box during the floor demonstration for her father and literally wept into an NBC microphone. But the networks' competitive zeal, their cameras poking at every face and their microphones inching up to every mouth, reached a point of diminishing returns. Too often TV reporters were not covering events but only themselves trying to create events. Candidates caught in motorcade after motorcade, or followed up and down their hotels floor by floor, quickly became a nuisance.

Especially during Nixon's arrival at the convention hall and Lodge's arrival at the Chicago airport, TV reporters, technicians and equipment turned the proceedings into bewildering, inexcusable mob scenes. More and more, TV interviewers tackled VIPs only to show that it could be done, not really because they expected or sought meaningful answers. A camera-eye close-up of reality can be fascinating--but it can also get so close that the human eye sees nothing at all.

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