Newscasting: Medium over Tedium

Antennas sprouting from the backs of their heads, huge earphones obviously linking them directly with Big Brother, they clearly dominated last week's Republican Convention—and the men they interviewed knew it. They had no hesitation in cutting off, say, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke in mid-thought with an authoritative "Excuse me, there is a signal from the anchor desk." From the Olympus of air-conditioned booths cantilevered above the convention floor, their colleagues, the TV pundits, looked down on the delegates with detachment and sometimes disdain, commenting with urbane coolness on the proceedings.

Four years ago, even the politicians agreed that convention coverage had become something of a bore. When it came right down to the wire, however, they found old habits hard to discard, including the absurdity of four seconding speeches even for favorite-son candidates. All the Republican National Committee had really done was to delay the proceedings until prime time and to limit the seconding speeches for candidates to five minutes. The net works found themselves reporting a spectacle whose script they were basically powerless to enliven. As NBC's John Chancellor noted in retrospect: "Conventions were structured and their main patterns made up when people got their information from newspapers. Today we are seeing something that was made for a newspaper age that has survived into a TV age."

Still, however oldfashioned, the conventions are quintessential television—history happening. Or at least for brief moments. The networks' challenge was to remain compelling in the hours between the moments. That challenge was considerable. What other show, after all, could run for several hours with a single set, no sex, a predictable plot, and its principal characters all offstage?

Circus Side. NBC this year took a hard-news approach. The only real news, the network obviously decided, was the shifting of votes between Front Runner Nixon and his opposition. But since there was very little "erosion," as possible vote shifts were invariably called, NBC viewers had to watch two days of model reporting in pursuit of a nonstory. CBS, on the other hand, tended to cover voting trends offscreen. Canvassing every single delegate, some since February, the network organized a running "CBS News Delegate Count." Since all that produced on the air was the latest totals,* CBS could devote more time to the circus side of the convention and diverting side bars.