TV Is Swept Along by Its Bias

The television networks were mad. They’d come to San Diego anticipating juicy intraparty squabbles at the GOP convention and instead found harmony. Worse yet, try as they might, this would be no Houston. They couldn’t manufacture it. The GOP had taken a page from the hugely successful Democratic convention in 1992 and prepared a virtually airtight, made-for-television event on their terms.

Network reporters wanted nothing to do with GOP choreography. None was more upset than Ted Koppel of “Nightline,” who complained that “the politicians . . . have more control over what we put on the air this week than they ever had before” and left in a pout. Those who remained constantly derided the convention as “carefully scripted” and “made-for-TV” and repeatedly told viewers that it didn’t represent the true Republican Party. “It was grand TV,” declared ABC’s Jim Wooten, “well scripted, well staged, craftily designed for a broadcast image of tolerance and diversity that’s starkly at odds with reality.”

NBC’s Bryant Gumbel was equally skeptical: “There’s an old adage that says, what you do speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you say. Republicans are speaking tolerance and diversity. Are you seeing any evidence of it? Or quite the contrary?” And NBC reporter David Bloom found the Republicans to be downright totalitarian: “Just how tightly scripted is this convention? Well, a Russian television reporter said today that this is as tightly controlled as anything the Communist Party ever put on.”

Why were TV reporters so upset? Analyst Kathleen Hall Jamieson explained on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” that the convention “lacked the conflict and the drama that is native to the vocabulary for television.”

Jamieson is half right. Conflicts between Republicans are big, often exaggerated news. But when the same controversies afflict the Democrats, they are papered over or ignored.

Take abortion. The networks aired 60 reports about the Republican abortion plank this year, only one on the Democrats’ position. Like addicts, reporters just couldn’t get enough during the Republican platform hearings. When Massachusetts Gov. William Weld declined to address the convention because the topic assigned to him was taxes, not abortion, ABC’s Cokie Roberts compared it with Democratic Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who was refused a pro-life speech in 1992 at Madison Square Garden. On the Sunday morning talk shows the day before the GOP convention began, there were 22 questions about the abortion issue. The GOP’s lack of “tolerance” over abortion remained a principal story throughout the convention.

If that coverage was acceptable, it begs the question: Where in the world were the same reporters during primetime coverage of the Democratic convention in 1992? After his snub, Casey was interviewed once and mentioned four times by CNN, interviewed once and never mentioned again on NBC and ignored on ABC and CBS. And how was the Democrats’ position on abortion--federal funding of abortion-on-demand--labeled? Though opposed by 81% of the public, not once was it called “extremist.”

Reporters did not denounce the “intolerance” unfolding before their eyes. They did not decry the scripted, choreographed nature of the Democratic gathering. No, they declared it a boffo performance and took on an infomercial-like tone themselves.

“That’s the ticket,” pronounced ABC’s Wooten. “Not a liberal in sight and that’s the picture Clinton wants the convention to leave with the country. Democrats happily moving from their liberal past to their centrist future.”

CBS’s Dan Rather announced: “Delegates approved the Clinton-Gore center-of-the-road Democratic platform, trying to move the party closer to the voters around the malls in America’s suburbs.”

ABC’s Peter Jennings was swept off his feet: “He’s become a little more disciplined, Bill Clinton, but you know he loves a crowd. And he has, don’t want to get too carried away here, but he has the kind of hands people respond to “

There’s a clear double standard at work here. Republicans get “60 Minutes”-style attacks. The Democrats, meanwhile, get C-SPAN.