Print v. Picture

On the 16th floor of Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel, Correspondent Rene MacColl of London's Daily Express rushed to a down elevator. The elevator girl waved him back imperiously. "Just a minute, sir," she said. "I'm on TV." Recounted MacColl: "I looked around, and by God, she was. A huge glare box was moving up behind me for an interview with her."

Like Correspondent MacColl, newsmen in Chicago last week sweated under the glare box at almost every turn. Already widely resented by reporters as troublesome interlopers (TIME, May 21), the TV cameras in unprecedented force imposed new hazards on the old art of covering a political convention. Sometimes the newsmen found themselves trapped in hotel corridors as the networks jockeyed their massive apparatus near the candidates' suites, often wielding it as a blockade against TV competitors. At least once, the blockade kept reporters out of a candidate's room, and cost them a story.

"Stacked Like Cordwood." Indeed, the timing and form of convention news breaks, on the floor and off, was shaped to the demands of TV. Said one CBS producer: "The smart politicians just automatically seem to give us priority." Said Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill: "A reporter who doesn't represent one of the big outfits doesn't have a chance any more of getting in to talk with one of the big figures. The politicians say: 'I'd rather be on TV. Why should I see this writer?' " At one point, there were so many politicians queueing for interviews at ABC's hotel studio that one of them, Michigan's Governor Mennen ("Soapy") Williams, cracked: "We're stacked up here like cordwood."

But the ubiquitous TV eye produced new techniques and new enterprise in the press. Every major news-gathering outfit monitored the convention on the TV screen. Legmen still rushed to the telephone to report news breaks to the wire services, but the first United Press bulletin on the Truman endorsement of Averell Harriman came from the rewrite man who saw it on TV. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's convention speech was hard to hear in the hall, so the Associated Press used TV sets for coverage. In New York, the Times took the tally on the presidential ballot off the screen and rushed it to the composing room for its table of how the states voted. For the word reporters, TV's advantage put a new premium on cultivating sources, getting the kind of candid not-for-attribution quotes that politicians hesitate to share with the voters on TV, chasing politicians where the cameras still cannot go; e.g., whenever Harriman nipped up the back stairs from his suite to Harry Truman's, he was trailed by half a dozen gasping newsmen.

Old Story. In the face of the TV screen, the newspapers' old running story of the full convention became somewhat less important (as the newspaper's play-by-play of the baseball game has become unimportant). The daily press threw new energy and new talent into exploring the offbeat byways of color and anecdote as well as the lofty heights of analysis and interpretation. Ironically, some of the best punditry came not from Chicago but from Washington, where Columnist Walter Lippmann watched the convention on TV. Some of the sidebars ran to outlandish trivia, e.g., the contents of Adlai Stevenson's laundry bag, but some of it reached new levels of excellence. For entertainment, few reporters could equal the New York Herald Tribune's wisecracking Sports Columnist Red Smith, who dealt with the convention like an athletic contest, sprinkled his copy with sports allusions and such gems as his description of Happy Chandler's campaign grin ("A hawg-jowl smile, meaty and succulent, with collard greens on the side"), Governor Frank Clement's coiffure ("He wears a small round part in his dark hair"), and political pundits ("sports experts with their shirttails tucked in").

Though pad-and-pencil newsmen competed briskly with the electronic press at the scene of the news, each getting constantly in the other's way, there was actually no competition between the TV screen and the printed word. They supplemented each other. When it came to speed and high fidelity to the news at the instant it was breaking, TV was in a class of its own. By the same token, for those who could not spend hours before a TV screen or who wanted the story rounded up and interpreted, readable at their own pace and convenience (and available for future reference), the printed page was worth a thousand TV pictures.

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