Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

Britain's recent election struck many voters there as too much like an + American presidential campaign. Pollsters, Madison Avenue techniques and television played too conspicuous a role. And to what end? Margaret Thatcher won as expected, even though almost everyone agreed that Labor's Neil Kinnock had campaigned more effectively on television (causing Lady Seear, a Liberal politician, to complain, "He may be a nice man, but for a Prime Minister it's not enough to be nice. It's not enough even for a cook!"). British politicians may be learning techniques from us, but it appeared to an American visiting during the election that U.S. television could learn something from the British.

American broadcasters tend to consider British TV news programs professionally put together but low budget, low key and kind of boring. Instead of anchormen, there are news readers who do not thrust their personalities at the viewer. Only a few interviewers with outsize gall, like Sir Robin Day of the BBC with his signature polka-dot bow ties, are true celebrities (our unknighted Sir Ted Koppels and Sir Tom Brokaws must be content with honorary college degrees).

For an American visitor, the strange and exhilarating result of the British coverage was to see the candidates plain, without distractions. When they held press conferences, the camera was on the candidate; the questioning reporters were only heard, not seen. Every night during the mercifully brief three-week campaign (ours, tedious already, still has 16 months to go), each major candidate got four or five minutes on the air, which is a lifetime on American news. He or she had enough time to make and develop a point. If the speech was boring, that was the candidate's problem, not the BBC's or ITV's. Try selling that to CBS, NBC or ABC.

All this reminded an American of how CBS covered Fritz Mondale's candidacy last time. Correspondent Susan Spencer, then on the way to becoming the able reporter she now is, would use up most of her time on network news describing the day's travels, mishaps, crowd reactions -- ephemera that could be found in daily newspaper stories. Sometimes, in the background, the candidate could be seen orating; at the last moment, the sound would pick up Mondale for a quick sentence or two, as if this alone, of all he said, deserved hearing. The other networks were equally condescending. What television is uniquely fitted to do -- show the candidate speaking for himself -- television disdained doing. Television calls these snippets sound bites, and on all three networks they are getting shorter and shorter: many are just six or seven words. Note how often the person in the news is not even allowed to finish a sentence, but the reporter always gets to finish his.

Viewers who have followed the Iranscam hearings have come to know not just Ollie and the lawyers but also a gallery of fascinating congressional characters who often were mere names before -- Inouye, Hamilton, Rudman, Mitchell, Boren, Hyde, Cohen, Hatch. Their questions, their demeanor and their quirks could be watched.They are now more recognizable than most of the "Seven Dwarfs" seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, who have largely been subjected to television's usual voice-over, snippety sound-bite techniques on the evening news. Of course, networks defend their sound bites by protesting how hard it is to condense all the news into 22 minutes; as serious journalists, they should consider dropping some of those cutesy sign- off feature stories that precede the anchorman's cheery "good night."

Any network executive who is afraid that the news broadcasts look too much alike could take a radically simple step. Let the anchorman say, "In Seattle, Candidate Dukakis attacked Reagan's foreign policy," then let the man speak for himself. Before long, presidential candidates might become as familiar as the television reporters who filter the news we are told about, and sometimes see.