POLITICS & amp; TELEVISION Unconventional coverage

By DAVID BAUDER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HE NATIONAL POLITICAL CONVENTIONS clearly aren't what they used to be, but PBS' Jim Lehrer isn't sure many people in television news recognize what they've become.
Contrary to his broadcast competitors, Lehrer will be on the air for three prime-time hours each night of next week's Democratic convention from Boston. He'll do the same thing with the Republicans in a month.
"I'm not the least bit worried that we won't have anything to talk about," he said.
TV viewers who want to follow the conventions this summer will have plenty of choices -- perhaps more than ever before. C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC all plan extensive, even gavel-to-gavel coverage.
The biggest broadcast networks, however, are continuing their long-running reduction of live coverage. ABC, CBS and NBC will be on the air live for three hours for each convention; that's the same as in 2000 for CBS and NBC, four hours less for ABC.
CBS' Dan Rather, who has covered or anchored every national convention since 1964, said he used to be a proponent of full-time coverage.
"But that was at a time when something really happened there, actual people were nominated, and the nominations weren't sewn up until we got there," Rather told reporters earlier this year. "Now there's virtually no defense of it."
He said he could foresee a day when the broadcasters take a pass from live coverage altogether.
Seeking what's different
Lehrer said he sensed many at the broadcast networks were nostalgic for a time that has come and gone.
"If they see a different kind of story and everyone sits around and moans, 'Oh, it's not the same old story anymore,' so what?" he said. "It's a different story. Go out there and cover it."
Stage-managed or not, the conventions are still a gathering place for the nation's political leaders and are where parties set the themes that will carry through the fall campaign, he said.
The last convention where real news was broken about the nomination process came in 1980, when Ronald Reagan briefly flirted with the idea of taking former President Ford as a running mate, said George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC News' "This Week."
Yet Pat Buchanan's angry speech in 1992 made news and, Stephanopoulos said, Walter Mondale probably sealed his defeat in 1984 when he said during his acceptance speech that he would raise taxes.
"In 1988, when ... George Herbert Walker Bush said, 'Read my lips: no new taxes,' he pretty much won the 1988 campaign and lost the 1992 campaign with one single speech," he said.
Amy Goodman, whose "Democracy Now" radio show is producing a two-hour daily TV report about the conventions that will be available by satellite, said the networks aren't looking beyond what is scripted for them.
"The real interaction, the real debate, is going on in the streets and in the suites," Goodman said.
Cable news moves in
She said she sensed a real hunger for alternative coverage from her mostly liberal audience.
Meanwhile, Fox News Channel, which appeals mostly to conservatives, has said it is increasing its convention coverage by about a third over 2000.
The presence of the cable news networks is often cited by broadcasters as another reason for cutting back. That's especially the case at NBC News, where MSNBC will offer extensive reports.
Lehrer said the broadcasters can't justify their decision journalistically or reconcile it with their public service roles.
"The huge audiences for television are still at the three commercial networks," he said, "and when they say to the American people that these conventions are not important enough to cover, they become, in my opinion, part of the message of the conventions themselves."
But CBS News President Andrew Heyward said that, besides live airings of the presidential and vice presidential nominations speeches, his network will cover the event extensively on the "CBS Evening News," "The Early Show," "Face the Nation" and online.
"That's a big commitment," Heyward said. "This shouldn't be interpreted as the networks' giving the back of their hand to the conventions."
The three networks can justify their decisions for commercial reasons. In 2000, only ABC aired a full hour of the GOP's conventions opening night, and 5.9 million people tuned in. At the same time, 10 million people watched a rerun of "Third Watch" on NBC.
Methods of delivery
ABC News' 2004 convention plan starkly illustrates the conflicting forces. It speaks to either indecision, guilt or a visionary view of how these events will be covered in the future, depending on your point of view.
On the main broadcast network, the three hours of coverage for each convention will be spread out over the events' four days.
Peter Jennings will anchor an additional 19 hours that requires some effort to find. It will be offered to some who get digital cable; so far, systems that reach 3.5 million homes are committed to carrying it.
A total of 22 million homes get digital cable, a fraction of the roughly 108 million homes that can see ABC.
The broadcast will also be available to millions more with broadband Internet access -- for a price.
There's a good shot more people will see C-SPAN than this extra ABC News coverage.
CBS' Heyward recognizes that the political conventions, those spectacles of pageantry that brought the phrase "smoke-filled room" into the lexicon, are much different than they were 30 or 40 years ago.
The press is, too.
"I think the audience is very sophisticated," he said. "Not only about what the conventions are, but about the options they have to read or listen or see them in a lot of different places."
XOn the Net: http://www.cnn.com/, http://www.msnbc.com/, http://www.foxnews.com, http://www.abcnews.com, http://www.cbs.com, http://www.pbs.org, http://www.c-span.org, http://www.democracynow.org.