Conference Call

By Laurence Zuckerman

Probably the last thing George Bush and Michael Dukakis wanted to think about last week was how often they would meet with the press after being elected. Like any other special-interest group hoping to pin down the future President, however, a band of prominent journalists tried to get the candidates to commit themselves to the No. 1 item on the press's 1988 wish list: more news conferences.

Organized by Harvard's Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, the 21-member commission conducted a 13-month study of an institution that was born at the turn of the century when Teddy Roosevelt invited the White House press corps in out of the rain. The once vigorous forum, the report concludes, "is now in a serious state of disrepair."

Commission members insist that the report is "party blind," but the project is clearly a reaction to the heavy-handed news management practiced by the Reagan Administration. Reagan has held fewer press conferences than any other TV-era President -- an average of about six a year, compared with 22 1/2 for John F. Kennedy -- and informal access to him has been tightly restricted. "Shouting questions above the roar of helicopter engines just does not make it," says NBC News Washington bureau chief Robert McFarland.

The commission recommends that the next President hold a minimum of two daytime press conferences a month plus six evening sessions a year. Dukakis embraced that formula; Bush refused to commit himself. However, as the report points out, most modern Presidents, including Reagan, promised to be more accessible to reporters, only to retreat as their terms wore on. Former NBC News correspondent Marvin Kalb, director of the Barone Center, is convinced that politicians cannot be truly successful without being open to the press. But his experience as a reporter forces him to admit that they can avoid the press with little damage. "The Bush campaign has kept its distance from the press," he says. "The Dukakis camp started out maintaining a constant dialogue, but found out there wasn't much mileage in it."