The Kids on the Bus

By Laurence Zuckerman

As the audience fills the cavernous chapel of Atlanta's Spelman College to hear Presidential Aspirant Jesse Jackson, Nils Kongshaug of CBS News is already seated in the back, notebook at the ready, savoring the gospel choir. "One thing that's great about the Jackson campaign is the music," observes Kongshaug, who has been traveling with the candidate since January. "Sometimes I'm disappointed when the gospel music ends and Jackson begins." Still, Kongshaug quickly adds, having to sit through the same impassioned speech several times a day is better than his previous CBS assignment, answering phones for the Evening News.

Meet the latest innovation in network political coverage: the off-air reporter-producer and all-around campaign shadow. With no front runners and no bottomless buckets of money, the networks decided at the outset against deploying a correspondent and camera crew with each of the 13 candidates. But ABC and CBS still wanted a daily presence on the campaign bus. So each created high-tech updates of the newspaper cub reporter. Mostly less experienced, and therefore less expensive, the tyros have been assigned, in campaign parlance, to stick with the "body." From Iowa to New Hampshire and across the South, these body watchers have doggedly followed their men, briefing higher-ranking correspondents and producers, who use the on-scene intelligence for broader, more thematic coverage. "If you want to know how Dick Gephardt's speech is different today from yesterday," says CBS's Terry Stewart, 29, "you are not going to ask Dan Rather. You're going to ask Terry Stewart."

In fact, the minutiae of what the shadows know make them a valued resource for the rest of the press corps as well. "She's a campaign institution," says Los Angeles Times Reporter Robert Gillette of ABC's Marianne Keeley, 28, who covers Jackson. Nonstop involvement with a campaign can cause problems; executives back in New York City have occasionally had to warn about getting too close to a candidate. But the body watchers' unceasing presence has also led to scoops. At a Florida stop two weeks ago, ABC's Dan Noyes, 29, previously a producer on Good Morning America, instructed a cameraman to shoot Dole Campaign Chairman William Brock talking to two top aides. Later that day the aides told him Brock had fired them while ABC was filming. Noyes quickly got an affiliate station to tape an interview. That night World News Tonight was the only show to feature pictures of the firing with comments from one of the aides.

The emergence of local TV news and communications satellites help make the new system possible. With local stations picking up each candidate wherever he goes, the blanket network coverage of previous years is redundant. If major news occurs when a network camera is not rolling, the candidate watcher can send in tape from a local affiliate via satellite the same day. "Local stations have become so reliable," says Joseph Angotti, chief of NBC's election coverage, "that we don't feel we need to have a correspondent and crew with the candidate all the time." The network did not assign anyone permanently to any campaign until after last month's New Hampshire primary.

ABC is fielding a slightly older, more seasoned team than CBS. "We would never send out a desk assistant," sniffs ABC's Keeley, who was an associate producer on the network's weekend news shows. Unlike their CBS counterparts, ABC's shadows are outfitted with laptop computers, which they use to file detailed memos and logs to a central computer. Noyes is the 1988 campaign's equivalent of James Bond. Inside a canvas flight bag, he carries not only the computer but also a portable letter-quality printer, microcassette recorder, still camera and tiny color TV set. Last week, while listening to Dole's speech in Jackson, Miss., Noyes tapped out a radio spot on his computer. Later, during a rally in Fort Lauderdale, he monitored ABC's evening news.

The biggest worry of the new kids on the bus last week was what would happen to them after Super Tuesday. Some, like the candidates they have been covering, are sure to return to old pursuits. If the field dwindles dramatically, a correspondent may be assigned to each of the surviving candidates. The body watchers were warned, says CBS Evening News Executive Producer Tom Bettag, that "when midnight strikes, they all turn into pumpkins." But executives already consider the Cinderella experiment a success. "They exceeded all our expectations," says Hal Bruno, ABC's political director. Correspondent Bob Schieffer was at first concerned that CBS was scrimping. Now he is an unabashed booster of the new system: "If we had all the money we needed to cover the campaign, I would recommend doing it exactly as we did it this time."

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York