TV Looks at Impeachment

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino was handed a note during the impeachment debate last Thursday afternoon. He glanced at it, then arched an eyebrow at CBS Reporter Roger Mudd, who followed a messenger from the committee room. Mudd learned that a bomb threat was about to interrupt the meeting and that the bomb's alleged location was in "a CBS camera." "I guess that this is one of those things that television brings," he said on the air during the ensuing recess.

TV's impact on the Judiciary Committee proceedings-- was hardly limited to anonymous threats. Four cameras and a panoply of klieg lights transformed the committee room into a blazing national platform. Yet the big eye's presence did not cause any histrionics. The contrast with last summer's Ervin-committee hearings was sharp. Speeches and statements were shorter; committee members are used to competing for time on the House floor with 434 colleagues, while Senators can afford a more leisurely pace. The TV cameras often appeared to be the raison d'etre of the Senate Watergate grillings; in the smaller, more intimate and somehow more professional Judiciary Committee room, they remained discreet onlookers.

Unblinking Coverage. The same could not be said for newsmen from ABC, which drew the Wednesday session under the networks' rotating-coverage plan (only the Public Broadcasting Service carried every meeting). When the committee was slow to reconvene after a bomb threat, Co-Anchor Man Howard K. Smith quipped unfunnily that the Representatives could "use a good TV director." At the end of the session, Smith concluded that he "would hate to spend three hours a night, 365 days a year" watching congressional committees in action--a bit of instant disparagement that seemed totally out of place.

The carping disappeared on succeeding days. CBS Newsmen Walter Cronkite, Bruce Morton and Mudd kept largely out of sight while committee members concluded their opening statements on Thursday. NBC's John Chancellor and Carl Stern (a law-school graduate) helped clarify Friday's complex procedural wrangles as the committee hammered out acceptable articles of impeachment. Sessions were not interrupted by commercials (a condition decreed by the House); interviews in the meeting room were forbidden. PBS conducted scholarly post-mortems on each session, drawing on outside experts and a battery of law professors.

Print journalists generally applauded TV's unblinking coverage. The Tulsa (Okla.) World found the TV scrutiny especially appropriate at a time when "Americans are in a 'show me' mood about politics and public life." New York Times Columnist James Reston was in a dissenting minority of commentators. He rather sourly accused committee members of "making recitations before the TV cameras" and decided that the whole exercise produced "bad law and boring television."

Audience reaction seemed to fall somewhere between these conflicting judgments. Ratings by A.C. Nielsen the day after the first session showed that ABC stations in New York City and Los Angeles initially doubled their normal audiences--but that New York viewers began switching to reruns of CBS's Cannon and Kojak after the first hour. CBS's share of the prime-time audience during its Thursday coverage was lower than ABC's the night before. Whatever the ratings, the live-TV coverage performed a valuable national service in giving the country at large a look at its Representatives as they struggled toward a historic decision. The experiment was being carefully studied by both rating-conscious network chiefs and leaders of the House, who must decide not only whether to impeach but also whether to televise. At week's end, it was virtually certain that the House leaders favorably impressed by the coverage would vote for TV.

* Although congressional hearings have been open to radio and TV, the full House and the Judiciary Committee had to approve the first-ever broadcast of a committee meeting.

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