Scrounging for Good Air

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

How a floor reporter works a cut-and-dried convention

NBC's Chris Wallace was getting edgy. He was supposed to interview Ron Reagan, the President's son, on the Republican Convention floor under the signpost of the New York delegation. But his interviewee, it turned out, was many yards away, under the standard of New York's alternates. Wallace ran to the Reagan seats in the VIP box, then circled the floor. By the time the misunderstanding was discovered, the "window" of open air time had passed.

For Wallace, the missed interview made three nights in a row of minor irritations. On the convention's first evening, he looked for moderates who dissented from the platform, but three people on his list were away from their seats, and a fourth declined to be openly critical, so he had to switch gears and interview a skeptic from the right, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. The next night Wallace's scheduled interview with Barbara Bush, the Vice President's wife, was truncated to two questions. But he had good luck as well: he had perhaps the clearest line to the convention's instant media celebrity, Susan Catania, an Illinois delegate who was clamored after because she had decided not to vote to renominate Reagan. Wallace covered her a decade ago, when she was a state legislator and he a local TV reporter in Chicago.

For most of the 13,000 journalists at the convention, the main topic of conversation was how hard it was to find a story. Said Walter Cronkite: "Up to now, the dullest one I ever covered was the 1956 convention that renominated Eisenhower. But this here may well win." There was almost no conflict, surprise or suspense, none of the drama that TV thrives on. Thus network floor reporters like Wallace had to hustle to find interviews that would get onto the air. They had no breaking news to follow, no deep divisions to exemplify. They did not even have many big names to interview: more than ever, the party's major celebrities were being taken up to the anchor booth.

Yet for Wallace, 36, a true political junkie who worked his first convention in 1964 as Cronkite's errand boy, being a floor reporter is "the most intense experience you can have." In 1980, Wallace scooped the other networks, albeit by seconds, on the choice of George Bush as Ronald Reagan's running mate, and that coup helped win him a job as NBC's White House correspondent. At the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, he screened out rivals from an exclusive interview with Joan Mondale by having his crew and her aides form a human fence. Last week he was able to use more traditional tactics, prearranging talks with party elders like Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada. Between glances at his color-coded floor map and scurrying to his next "target of opportunity," Wallace described his convention role as "part journalist, part producer, part booking agent, part offensive lineman." He might have added, part agent provocateur. Like his father, CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace, Chris has an instinct for seeking out controversy, sometimes for arousing it. He described his feisty exchange with Helms, who accused journalists of distorting Reagan's policies, as "a pretty fair tennis match."

While NBC stuck with the usual total of four floor reporters, the slow news prompted CBS to cut its roster to three, and ABC to two. Even the pared-down contingents were not overly busy: ABC's Lynn Sherr spent nearly half an hour waiting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Charles Percy before telling him that the network, which had already passed on him once, had decided to do so again. TV reporters acknowledged having given disproportionate attention to the discontented minority at the convention, and several were accosted by delegates and charged with liberal bias, although the problem may simply have been the urge to find a lively debate where there was none.

In the past, reporters prepared copiously for floor assignments. This time, most of them found little need to scan the arcane computerized data, little chance to display erudition. Indeed, the interview choices seemed to be so obvious that on several occasions network crews were lined up three deep alongside such figures as Catania or President Reagan's Campaign Consultant Drew Lewis, turning the usual traffic jam in the aisles into human gridlock. Summed up Wallace: "There were two clear advantages to this assignment. One was that the layers of buffer between reporters and politicians were gone; they were all right there in front of you, ready to be engaged in conversation. The other was, if you like to appear on television, there was the chance to do so four or five times a night, although not necessarily with something exciting to say." --By William A. Henry III