Viewpoint: No Time for Partisans

By * Richard Schickel

"The news media should never create news, it should only cover news . . . Take all these cameras out of here . . . do that within 15 minutes and this crowd would peter out."

The speaker is a delegate to last summer's Republican National Convention, nervously eying a group of weird-looking youths assembled to taunt him and his fellows at the entrance to the Miami Beach auditorium. The listeners are a cinema verite team from CBS News, working on a stylish documentary about how one aspect of the big story--the hippie-yippie-zippie street demonstrations--was covered by their colleagues.

Unfortunately for Producer-Reporter John Sharnik, this story within the story did not amount to much more than a few gaseous brushes between cops and kids--stuff that Executive Producer Robert Wussler, who called most of the shots in Central Control during the convention, chose sensibly to ignore. Thus, through no fault of its creators. CBS Reports: Anatomy of a News Story, which is being aired this week, does not have quite strong enough a spine. On the other hand, the demonstrators' lack of emotional intrusiveness does allow the reporters--and the viewer--to concentrate on how raw information travels up the pipes, how various hands shape it into a manageable story as it goes along.

High Pressure. For some, Anatomy should be very reassuring: things move so fast that liberal or conservative commentators do not have time to slant the news. Quite obviously, the kind of nervous system that used to be attracted to city rooms in The Front Page's era now finds its true home in TV control booths. The keyed-up newsmen working for CBS are good at their jobs, at least in part because they are juiced by the constant demand to make decisions at speed. Yet within the inevitable limits of time, this documentary shows, they did a reasonable, balanced news report of the convention.

Anatomy of a News Story never directly responds to that anonymous delegate's injunction merely to cover, not create, news. There is no need to do so. The program simply and quietly accepts the fact that such neat divisions of function are no longer feasible. Hearteningly, it also implies that TV newsmen are acutely aware of the dangers this new situation presents and, even in the most heated moments, do their best to guard against them. Anatomy is neither self-critical nor self-congratulatory. It is, rather, what any good news story ought to be--a cool, objective, craftsman-like report on the way one interesting, quite typical happening worked out. Good show.

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