Neil Hickey
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 Starting with the 1952 Presidential election year, which saw Dwight
Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson win the nominations of their parties, the
major broadcast networks offered viewers wall-to-wall, live coverage of
all the hip hooray and ballyhoo, the speeches, parades, spectacle and
mule-trading of the two political conventions. Since then, the quantity
of airtime and resources devoted to the conventions by broadcasters has
dwindled to a fraction of that original commitment.
There are plenty of good reasons for that: the candidates are
chosen by early March -- rather than at the two party confabs in July and
August -- due to the proliferation of primary elections. Numerous other
outlets now provide coverage: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, C-Span. And
besides, viewer interest in political conventions has declined steadily
over the last half-century. Television outlets that broadcast political
conventions suffer in the ratings against those that don't.
Nevertheless -- and here's an outrageous notion -- a return
to full-bore convention coverage by ABC, CBS, and NBC would be a
bountiful, useful gift to the nation. Is it too much to ask of networks,
whose stations use the public's airwaves free of charge, to clear their
prime time schedules once every four years for an intensive look at the
two parties -- their policies, personalities, and prospects? Those three
networks reach a vastly greater audience than the all-news cable channels.
Barely 70 percent of TV homes receive cable; all get broadcast signals.
Apart from the (usually tiresome, self-serving) convention
speeches, there are scores of national and international issues that have
crucial effects on Americans' lives. Nobody ventilates those better than
Rather and Brokaw and Jennings and the experienced teams of reporters and
analysts who surround them. They'd leap at the luxury of so expansive a
newshole to offer a truly depthy report on the state of the union as the
quadrennial national election loomed. Many TV stations -- seeing the
chance for prime time exposure -- would eagerly send crews to interview
members of their state delegations on matters of local importance.
ABC News' Sam Donaldson recently lamented, "For us to run long
programs in prime time as a public service doesn't make a lot of sense
anymore to our bosses." Nonetheless, the broadcast industry expects to
make $600 million from candidate and issue advertising this year -- six
times more than it earned from politics a generation ago. Maybe the
broadcasters owe the public a little something for renting out the
public's own airwaves at such prices.
Will the republic suffer if TV audiences are denied summer reruns
of "Spin City" and "Friends"? Instead of Martin Sheen playing the president
in "West Wing," how about a really close and candid look at the Democrat and
Republican standard bearers -- one of whom will become the world's most
powerful leader.
Neil Hickey is editor-at-large of the Columbia Journalism Review.
He was TV Guide's New York bureau chief for 25 years and senior editor for
5. His journalism career began on Baltimore newspapers. He has reported
from Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Northern
Ireland, the Baltics, Cuba, Singapore and elsewhere. He's the author of
a number of books, among them "Adam Clayton Powell and the Politics of
Race."
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