Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

Summer used to be the time when serious news took a holiday. Some readers grumbled that important issues went unmulled in all the concentration on summer's zany trivialities. But no longer. In Moscow as well as Washington, public figures have decided that feeding news to the press should be a year- round occupation.

In an election year, when members of Congress might want to be back in their district politicking, they were busy on-camera deep into August (television coverage now gives them priceless visibility back home), striking attitudes about South Africa and Supreme Court Justices and crafting the new tax bill. Over at the White House, feeding the 7 o'clock news is taken most seriously. The attitude is that if you don't divert the press with themes of your own, the press will be asking questions you don't want to talk about. So, in the weeks before Reagan began his real vacation in Santa Barbara, his press aides have been busy arranging symbolic non-news and photo opportunities to show a caring and involved President.

Just to be seen strolling to or from a helicopter on the White House lawn, shouting an evasive answer to Sam Donaldson, must seem to the Reagans not quite satisfactory enough of a 7 p.m. presence, and this inane scene certainly galls the press. White House stage managers have accordingly become adept at finding appropriate soapboxes and visual backdrops for the President, a series of Potemkin villages not to deceive a ruler but to catch the restless eye of his subjects. When Reagan worries about Republican defections in the farm belt, the presidential podium and the press corps are flown out to a state fair in Illinois, where he can speak against a backdrop of hay. Should there be a show of concern about the Middle East? Vice President Bush travels to see the friendlies in Israel, Jordan and Egypt. The press was driven to analyzing not what the trip accomplished but whether it had any content at all. It was the White House that staged and stamped it as news and the press that went along for the ride. The networks, eager to give an air of importance to the summer lull, are all too willing to play along with staged news, and thus share a complicity. President Reagan now has big-league competition in the creation of news, non-news and is-it-or-isn't-it news. Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev has obviously spent a lot of time analyzing not just Reagan's positions but his techniques for putting them across. The Kremlin has shown a new adroitness in presenting its case abroad. Reagan and Gorbachev have spent the summer in graceful minuet, each moving a step forward or backward, finding + some movement, or none at all, in the other's proposals, alternately expressing doubts or confidence that a summit is possible. To a Western Europe highly concerned about the nuclear race, the Soviets have seemed more genuinely interested in, or in need of, an agreement. Or is Reagan as usual holding back until the last possible moment to compromise? After Soviet and American negotiators met in private recently at a dacha near Moscow, neither side blurted to the press. CBS Moscow Correspondent Wyatt Andrews, standing outside with nothing to report, observed brightly that important things plainly had to be happening when such prominent people on both sides were gathered. But he didn't sound too sure. Sometimes it takes a while to learn whether non-news will really lead to news.