From Unknown to 'What's He Really Like?'

NEWSWATCH/THOMAS GRIFFITH

If New Hampshire is any sample, the press and television will be very conspicuous and unusually self-conscious this election year. Not only were too many candidates chasing too few votes, but too many reporters and camera crews were chasing too little news. Candidates knew they had to score early or fade, but for the press New Hampshire was a kind of out-of-town tryout for their season's coverage, and with their cameras, sound stages and numbers, they saturated the small arena. To add to the sense of journalistic overkill, the press itself was often dogged by three sets of political scientists and dozens of students with notebooks, cameras and tape recorders, all bent on examining--as one consortium of professors from Yale, M.I.T. and Duke has it--whether "the media is the new political power broker."

This notion--or is it an accusation?--bears looking at as Massachusetts, Florida and all the rest bear down on us. The vogue phrase for coverage that overwhelms an occasion and by magnification distorts it is "media event." But before this catchy description becomes the accepted word, before critics of the press begin their chant about conspiratorial press cabals, it might be wise to ask what real influence the press had over the event. This year, probably not much. New Hampshire produced too many words, but only the egregious prattle of the local press lord, William Loeb, could be said to disturb the peace.

A more substantial worry about the "power" of the press can be studied in an exchange between CBS Anchorman Walter Cronkite and Roger Mudd (one of television's more engaging gurus) in Iowa a few weeks earlier. "It's not exactly the precise figures that will be important," intoned Mudd. "It's whether the media and the politicians agree that this man won and this man lost."

Such a dangerous thought is bound to quicken the blood of any true-blue mediaphobe. Yet interpreting election results is as inescapable as it is necessary. It is a game any number can play, and it would be better if more did, for reporters, questioning each other in the intimacy of press buses, are in danger of returning lookalike, inbred answers. Actually, interpreting requires no press card. One need only give the subject as much study as thousands of Americans devote to their Daily Racing Form.

In politics, Messrs. Gallup and Harris make the odds. On primary day, it matters less whether you won or lost than whether you did better than "expected." The possibility, of course, remains that earlier polls of a candidate's strength were all wrong, and that he neither gained nor lost strength but got the vote he was going to get all along. But that's show business--and contemporary politicians, being showmen, are experts at poor mouthing their chances and minimizing their reverses. So you have the spectacle of Birch Bayh insisting on how well he did by finishing third.

Politics is a funny three-way affair: while candidates battle each other, they also play games with the press, which they need--and fear. Every one of the candidates has already demonstrated a practiced ability to return a pat answer on any subject. So far everything has been mannerly, if only because this year's fashion is to appear calm and reasonable. But things could change.

The press seeks to pierce the candidate's evasions, as a kind of self-appointed surrogate for the public. Candidates in turn want the "exposure" that news coverage brings them, but not any true exposure of themselves. If anything, candidates have so far been too deferential to the press, too solicitous of the good opinion of television's superstar anchormen. But this also could change, and if it does, the man likeliest to change the mood is Ronald Reagan, whose natural constituency includes the greatest number of mediaphobes. He is already holding citizen "press" conferences at which the press is not allowed to ask questions.

Television has turned half a dozen candidates, once unknowns and underdogs, into personages whose tics, mannerisms and attitudes are at least as familiar to the public as those of the cast of Upstairs, Downstairs. They now exist on their own. But television knowledge of a person always prompts the next question: "What's he really like?" (The swirl has already begun about Jimmy Carter.) Convinced that it already knows part of the answer, the public is apt to be more critical of press coverage from now on. Good thing, too.

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