The Made-for-TV Convention

Tom Ellis felt doublecrossed. It was nearly 2 a.m., and the chairman of the North Carolina delegation had asked for a roll-call vote on a pro-Reagan foreign policy amendment to the Republican platform, when pro-Ford Convention Chairman John Rhodes ordered a voice vote and gaveled the session to a close. Reagan delegations exploded in anger. Screamed Ellis: "Railroaded! You have broken the rules!" It was one of the most dramatic moments of last week's Republican National Convention.

Except the nation never saw it. CBS's Lesley Stahl ran up, shouting "Mister, who are you?" and other network reporters witnessed Ellis' rage. But the TV cameras had already homed in on the anchor men for closing comments. Much of the week was like that. In spectacular contrast to last month's Democratic Convention, the early part of the Republican gathering was so laced with suspense, color, passion and occasional humor that the show seen on the tube was far hotter than a made-for-television movie.

Too many of the convention's best moments, however, came while television looked the other way. All three networks missed seeing Vice President Nelson Rockefeller set off a near fistfight when he grabbed a North Carolina delegate's Reagan placard. While New York Senator Jacob Javits delivered the week's lone liberal address, and Reagan delegates broke into noisy disapproval, NBC Anchor Men John Chancellor and David Brinkley contemplated a souvenir towel from the 1968 convention. With few thoughtful exceptions in the anchor booths--ABC's George McGovern on the vice presidency, CBS'S brisk Bill Moyers on virtually anything, Walter Cronkite on mercifully little for a change--television proved once again that it explains less effectively than it informs.

Not that the three networks did not try. Altogether they spent some $12 million in Kansas City, and accounted for nearly one-fifth of the 9,500 journalists and support troops. CBS alone assembled a fleet of 400 rental cars for its staff of 650. NBC finished off a half-built Kansas City apartment building for some of its people and imported seven vans full of furniture from Raleigh, N.C. Even ABC, which devoted only 60% as much air time to the convention as its competitors, put up a 300-ft.-long structure (dubbed "the Bridge on the River Kwai") to carry cables into the Kemper Arena.

Brisk Escort. The networks trained their combined force of 84 cameras in and around the arena on almost anything that moved, including the delegate, late Tuesday night, who brandished a hand-lettered sign that read: JANET, ORDER ME TWO EGGS AND COFFEE. I'LL BE THERE IN 30 MINUTES. Then there was Delegate Dene Pace of Corinth, Miss., who told Mike Wallace on CBS that she had waited for "a vision from the Lord" before making up her mind, and that the Lord had just sent word--"Ford."

Television also captured a few incidents that might not have taken place had it not been for its power. When Ford Campaign Chairman Rogers Morton said he was unable to reach the troubled Mississippi delegation by telephone, CBS's Dan Rather briskly escorted him across the floor. Morton was halfway there before he thought better of it and escaped. While the Mississippi delegation caucused in a CBS trailer, Mike Wallace was locked outside, but three young CBS pages inside--sons of Commentator Moyers, Correspondent Roger Mudd and Producer Perry Wolff--took in every word. They were deprived of a major scoop only because the delegation failed to reach an agreement.

The electronic push into the business of the convention did not go unnoticed--or unpunished. Just before the balloting on rule 16c, Temporary Convention Chairman Robert Dole ordered reporters off the floor, while the delegates cheered. CBS Floor Producer Don Hewitt immediately phoned Dole to protest, but television reporters and their bulky equipment were not back clogging the aisles at full strength for nearly an hour. When NBC Reporter Tom Pettit's earphone antenna was banged and bent by an unidentified flying object during a Wednesday-night Ford demonstration, David Brinkley remarked: "You get ten points for hitting a reporter. There have been conventions in the past where you got 20 points."

Old Distrust. Despite a few antipress outbursts, the Sunbelt Republicans, who provided most of the convention action, appeared to have outgrown their old distrust of the Eastern-based networks. "They have discovered what protesting students and blacks discovered a decade ago," concluded Columnist Joseph Kraft. "They have come to know how to play media games." Indeed, in many ways the convention was a manipulated-for-TV event. President Ford and Ronald Reagan scheduled their arrivals in Kansas City to ensure live coverage on the ABC and CBS pre-convention specials. The Ford forces posted two men in trailers just outside the arena to furnish pro-Ford luminaries for interviews with network floor reporters.

The reporters, pressing for news breaks, were themselves pressed. "I can't move, I can't breathe, I can't see, I can't talk. This is awful," muttered ABC's Ann Compton as she tried to swim upstream through a crowded aisle. Compton rose to the occasion, beating her colleagues to several good interviews, including one with Rockefeller just after the Vice President's scuffle. Trouble was, her producers chose not to use it, a common frustration for floor reporters. ABC's Sam Donaldson, unable to sell his control room an interview with one politician, quickly called in another possibility: "Hello! Hello! Here comes Senator Baker! Wanna do something with Howard Baker?"

NBC's Douglas Kiker fought his way to Betty Ford in a dead heat with CBS's Sylvia Chase, but gracefully let her go first. Even NBC'S Pettit, a raging bull at Madison Square Garden last month, was a model of courtliness, standing by patiently while Mudd of CBS beat him to an interview with former Missouri Representative Thomas Curtis. "The kind of abrasiveness that was customary and sometimes necessary in 1968 is out of place now," explained Dan Rather. "We're a little cooler headed."

Whether this new politesse will survive until 1980, and whether convention coverage has by now frozen into a mold, are open questions. "We have reached such a point of sophistication that the changes become less major every four years," says CBS Executive Producer Ross Bensley. "We won't change, but the parties might," predicts NBC Executive Producer Gordon Manning. "Do they really need four days?"

Peculiar Way. No matter how many days they will need in 1980, some viewers will probably find the national political conventions to be little more enlightening than other made-for-television productions. "It's a noisy, big show and a very peculiar way to choose your leader," sniffed one biased observer in Kansas City last week, Novosti Press Agency Correspondent Gene Gerasinov. "In my country, we have our conventions in the daytime."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.