COVERING A RUNAWAY CAMPAIGN

This was supposed to be a whole different ballgame. This year, we pledged, the press wasn't going to fall for any of those flag-factory photo-ops that made a mockery of campaign coverage in 1988.

This year, reporters vowed, candidates wouldn't be allowed to keep dodging the press, or their opponents, or tough questions on major issues.

This year the media swore off distractions like the Pledge of Allegiance or membership in the ACLU. And you'd have to do a lot better than Willie Horton to get free media embarrassing your opponent this time around.

As it happens, most of these promises have been kept. It is by now apparent that the lessons of Campaign '88 have been learned and applied -- just in time for Campaign '92, which promptly rendered them irrelevant.

In 1988, Vice-President George Bush hid from the press for weeks at a time. One resourceful scribe even brought a megaphone to campaign events to shout his (invariably ignored) queries. In 1992 the candidates are everywhere. Ross Perot turned up on morning TV so often they practically had him reading the weather. Bill Clinton may hold the record for getting-on-Donahue-without-being-sexually-abused (though his father's alcoholism probably didn't hurt). And on July 1 former shrinking-violet George Bush actually invited CBS This Morning into the Rose Garden. Host Harry Smith asked the president, "Why did we continue to support Saddam Hussein even though we knew he was skimming U.S. support to help develop his nuclear arms?"

Bush: "I don't know where you got that, Harry."

Smith: "The State Department -- there's a . . ."

Bush: "The State Department didn't know it."

That Smith let Bush roll right over him is not all that surprising. He is, after all, the same journalist who responded to the news that Bush's economic plan was twenty-nine pages long -- compared to twenty-two pages for Clinton's -- with the observation: "That is certainly a more substantial plan, I guess, if it's got more pages in it."

Bush's Rose Garden performance is worth recalling precisely because at the time it went almost unnoticed, even though the documents proving State Department knowledge of Iraqgate had been in the public record for months. In 1992, the problem isn't lack of access, it's lack of attention.

After four years of chanting "Won't Get Fooled Again," the press seems oddly passive, more spinned-against than spinning. There are exceptions, of course. But a report card on campaign coverage so far would have to show the media as classic underachievers: bright but bored.

The single most important story in the campaign -- Patrick E. Tyler's front-page New York Times expose of administration plans to bomb Baghdad to give Bush a boost at the GOP convention -- created less stir than the news that Ross Perot might re-enter the race. The Time's decision to play Tyler's piece the way it did -- all the more remarkable for a paper that once sat on a story about plans for the bay of Pigs invasion -- drew less comment than the New York Post's coverage of Bush's alleged extramarital affair.

This time around, the information is not only out there, it's easier to find than ever before. Thanks to the American Political Network's invaluable Hotline, a daily on-line national sampling of print and electronic campaign-related stories, any reporter within reach of a modem can not only follow the fluctuations in the Conventional Wisdom (CW), but can also get tipped to unconventional reportage as soon as it surfaces. The Iraqgate scandal, for example, has been unfolding in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times, with some key boosts from Nightline. Hotline subscribers have been able to savor every new tidbit -- or, if the spirit moves them, to try and advance the story. Computerized FEC filings made it possible for even the chronically underfunded In These Times to trace nearly a third of Bill Clinton's donors to Wall Street firms -- while the Hotline made John Judis's analysis in the weekly available to less diligent reporters around the country.

A less momentous use of a novel resource was New York Times reporter Andrew Rosenthal's witty dissection of George Bush, revolutionary rhetorician. Back when the president was trying to recast himself as "the change agent," Rosenthal, with the help of Presidential Documents, an electronic compilation of White House records, charted the rise of words like "revolution" and "change" in presidential speechifying and the decline of "prudent" and "cautious."

In 1988 the big problem was media manipulation. In 1992 that's still a problem, though this time around it's the Democrats who are the Sultans of Spin. Some observers credit this to Clinton's ability to digest hot political books, like E. J. Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics or Thomas Byrne Edsall's Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, and regurgitate their essential arguments to admiring reporters (like Dionne or Edsall). Others suggest Clinton is the beneficiary of the press corps' generational hunger, not so much for a president who knows the words to "Louie, Louie" as for a chance at the levers of power (and the attendant perks) which a rising generation of policy wonks have been lusting after for over a decade.

The big problem in 1992 is the crushing consensus about what is, and is not, subject to political debate. George Bush can be attacked for proposing a capital gins tax cut, and Bill Clinton hailed (or assailed) for proposing a tiny increase in the top rate, without any sustained reporting on the overall tax burden in the U.S., on how little Americans get for their taxes, or on how none of the candidates proposes to do anything about the widening gap between rich and poor.

Bill Clinton made encouraging noises about banking reform to William Greider during his Rolling Stone interview, but Clinton's free-trade rhetoric and apparent comfort with "having a higher percentage of people at lower wage levels" left Greider asking, "Which side are you really on?" Still, Greider deserves credit for raising the question, and even more credit for trying to break some taboos with his PBS program Betrayal of Democracy, which, with Bill Moyers's PBS series Listening to America, represent the high watermarks of televised politics this year. Moyers's adaptation of Donald Bartlett and James Steele's Philadelphia Inquirer series "America: What Went Wrong?" is also a refreshing departure from the governing myth of campaign coverage: that the choice between two (or three) men is an adequate substitute for a real debate about the reign of money in U.S. politics or the responsibilities of corporations to their workers.

Only a vulgar Marxist would find the commercial networks' failure to tackle similar topics suggestive of anything more sinister than institutional sloth. When they did rouse themselves, the Big Three did a relatively creditable job of covering the surface of a campaign whose main events always seemed to be off-camera: on talk radio shows, or CNN, or in neighborhoods like South Central L.A. where the camera crews couldn't go. Koppel made his usual earnest effort to get to the bottom of whatever the problem du nuit happened to be, but Nightline's reluctance to devote more than a night or two to any topic (and a guest list tilted heavily towards the CW) make Moyers look even better by comparison. Peter Jennings gets high marks for his decree that ABC would "only devote time to a candidate's daily routine if it is more than routine. There will be less attention to staged appearances and sound-bites designed exclusively for television." CBS also deserves kudos for its policy of expanding the sound-bite from 7.seconds to 30 seconds, though the network's quick retreat to 20 seconds turns a B-plus into a B-minus, and the Center for Media and Public Affairs' Vince Sollitto reports backsliding to 17 seconds.

As a network NBC offered little in the way of innovation, but it did have Andrea Mitchell. Time and again Mitchell was the only reporter on a story, as when Bush vetoed campaign funding reform.

Perhaps the most notable feature of campaign print coverage is the spectacular irrelevance of the pundits. As the Sunday talk shows made painfully obvious, Bigfoot has become just another dinosaur lumbering along in a landscape it doesn't understand, making too much noise and chewing up the scenery for no apparent purpose. The only major columnist who did more than in tone the CW was William Safire, whose internal struggle between hatred of Bush and distaste for the Democrats and all their works made for must reading. As Safire goes, so go a lot of other neo-cons, and Clinton's clandestine courtship of what might be called the Scoop Jackson wing of both parties (which surfaced briefly in an endorsement ad signed by such cold-war luminaries as Paul Nitze, Edward Luttwak, and Ed Koch) has to rank among the most under-reported stories of the campaign.

On campaign mechanics -- inside baseball stories like Howard Kurtz's profile of Clinton media-whiz Mandy Grunwald, who put him on Arsenio and Imus in the Morning, or David Von Drehle's superb account of the tribulations of Bush's advance men -- The Washington Post was untouchable. But the same inside-the-beltway perch made the paper's political reporting seem lackluster and conventional.

Once you got past The New York Times editorial page's relentless cheerleading for Clinton, on the other hand, the paper's news columns combined stylish writing (Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly) with first-rate political reporting.

The Times is a rich newspaper, so its depth of coverage ought to be a given (though the paper's dismissive treatment of Brown's candidacy proved that it isn't). What seemed new was the reporters' freedom to lead readers to evident, but slightly controversial, conclusions. Michael Kelly's deftly balanced (but devastating) reports on the Perot phenomenon show what a reporter on a longer leash can do, though B. Drummond Ayres's hallucinatory account of Jesse Jackson as "a man beaten" at the Democratic convention suggests that some leashes need to be shorter than others. Even more striking were Andrew Rosenthal's virtuoso turns on how to provide context without hobbling your narrative: "'I stand against those who use films or records or television or video games to glorify killing law enforcement officers,' said Mr. Bush, who counts among his top supporters the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose character in the movies Terminator and Terminator II: Judgment Day kills or maims dozens of policemen."

New York Post reporter Deborah Orin's coverage of Clinton's shift on abortion, which credits GOP sources but pursues a story most of the media ignored, also deserves honorable mention, as does Murray Waas and Doug Frantz's Iraqgate series in the Los Angeles Times, which put the pieces of Henry Gonzalez's jigsaw puzzle together for the public.

How bad was campaign coverage on the whole? Compared to what? Far, far better than coverage of the gulf war -- a topic still so strangled by consensus that Mark Crispin Miller's two-part expose of Pentagon prevarications (in the June 24 and September 15 New York Times) got less play than the TV debut of Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas who told Sally Jessy Raphael she'd had an "encounter" with Clinton. And far worse than it should be. We treat the culture war as a sideshow, when in our system it's really the main event. We report a great deal about the individual candidates, and next to nothing about the interests they represent. We write a length on the candidates' attacks, and hardly at all on the underlying conflicts which shape our political choices.

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