The Press: China Coverage: Sweet and Sour

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For the television viewer, the President's trip was a remarkable demonstration both of TV's powers and limitations. No written account could convey, as did the live camera, the drama of Nixon and Chou touching glasses after a quarter-century of enmity. At the same time, no written account could be as tedious as a camera searching for something—almost anything—to record.

Nothing could mar the coverage of the landing at Peking's airport. Undramatic in itself, the event nonetheless had something of the excitement of the first landing on the moon. Would the Chinese roll out a red carpet? Would Chou ride in the President's car? The symbolism of these seemingly minor questions of protocol was obvious on the home screen, briefly lending the proceedings high suspense.

Tour Guide. Indeed, from a critic's viewpoint, the first day, despite a few flubs and miscues, was the season's best network TV show. With deadpan eye, the camera faithfully recorded Premier Chou choosing choice tidbits for Dick and Pat, like some top-level guide on a Gray Lines tour of Chinatown. Later, when the meal and the speeches were over, the camera with equal fidelity observed the toasts and watched the Chief Executive clink glasses with what seemed like the entire Peking hierarchy. Yet the mixture of high and low, trivial and important, seemed right, and gave the whole affair that touch of verisimilitude that makes the fantastic real.

The thrill of discovery quickly wore off. TV crews and reporters were soon scurrying frantically to satisfy the medium's insatiable appetite for novelty, sometimes achieving massive inanity instead. During coverage of the first great banquet, correspondents—who had not been given menus—variously described those little orange balls decorating the table's center as pomegranates, oranges or JellO. (They were actually North China tangerines.)

Camera crews went on official side trips to communes and factories, and visited an army base. CBS's Dan Rather ventured into a Peking short-order shop where he found, to no one's great surprise, Chinese eating such things as pork stew and noodles. Trying to pick up any scrap of news, everybody followed every move Mrs. Nixon made. NBC's Barbara Walters, one of three women included in the press group, hovered so close to the First Lady that other members of the press contingent nicknamed her "No. 2." Mrs. Nixon, in fact, should be given a gold-plated Emmy award.

Especially at first, practiced TV performers found themselves at a loss for words. Was Peking excited by the President's arrival? CBS's New York anchorman Charles Collingwood asked Walter Cronkite. Replied Cronkite, honestly if unhelpfully: "I don't know." Even ABC's usually wry and witty Harry Reasoner stumbled occasionally. Chinese society, he concluded after two days, was starkly puritanical, and he had read that young Chinese remained virgins through their early 20s. Reasoner's comment would come as a surprise, no doubt, to some young Chinese.