China Coverage: Sweet and Sour

For the television viewer, the President's trip was a remarkable demonstration both of TV's powers and limitations. No written account could convey, as did the live camera, the drama of Nixon and Chou touching glasses after a quarter-century of enmity. At the same time, no written account could be as tedious as a camera searching for something--almost anything--to record.

Nothing could mar the coverage of the landing at Peking's airport. Undramatic in itself, the event nonetheless had something of the excitement of the first landing on the moon. Would the Chinese roll out a red carpet? Would Chou ride in the President's car? The symbolism of these seemingly minor questions of protocol was obvious on the home screen, briefly lending the proceedings high suspense.

Tour Guide. Indeed, from a critic's viewpoint, the first day, despite a few flubs and miscues, was the season's best network TV show. With deadpan eye, the camera faithfully recorded Premier Chou choosing choice tidbits for Dick and Pat, like some top-level guide on a Gray Lines tour of Chinatown. Later, when the meal and the speeches were over, the camera with equal fidelity observed the toasts and watched the Chief Executive clink glasses with what seemed like the entire Peking hierarchy. Yet the mixture of high and low, trivial and important, seemed right, and gave the whole affair that touch of verisimilitude that makes the fantastic real.

The thrill of discovery quickly wore off. TV crews and reporters were soon scurrying frantically to satisfy the medium's insatiable appetite for novelty, sometimes achieving massive inanity instead. During coverage of the first great banquet, correspondents--who had not been given menus--variously described those little orange balls decorating the table's center as pomegranates, oranges or JellO. (They were actually North China tangerines.)

Camera crews went on official side trips to communes and factories, and visited an army base. CBS's Dan Rather ventured into a Peking short-order shop where he found, to no one's great surprise, Chinese eating such things as pork stew and noodles. Trying to pick up any scrap of news, everybody followed every move Mrs. Nixon made. NBC's Barbara Walters, one of three women included in the press group, hovered so close to the First Lady that other members of the press contingent nicknamed her "No. 2." Mrs. Nixon, in fact, should be given a gold-plated Emmy award.

Especially at first, practiced TV performers found themselves at a loss for words. Was Peking excited by the President's arrival? CBS's New York anchorman Charles Collingwood asked Walter Cronkite. Replied Cronkite, honestly if unhelpfully: "I don't know." Even ABC's usually wry and witty Harry Reasoner stumbled occasionally. Chinese society, he concluded after two days, was starkly puritanical, and he had read that young Chinese remained virgins through their early 20s. Reasoner's comment would come as a surprise, no doubt, to some young Chinese.

Too Late. More revealing were the networks' sidebar interviews with ordinary people. Barbara Walters talked with her interpreter, a bureaucrat who had been sent with his wife to the country to work with peasants. Their three children had been left behind, and the interpreter was now uncomplainingly separated even from his wife. That brief vignette spoke a volume about the dutiful Chinese character and the Maoist regime.

As the week progressed TV's pundits gradually recovered enough from their initial excitement and culture shock to offer some sharp, personal comments. After the trip to the army base Cronkite noted that the tanks being destroyed in a training exercise were American and that the division, the 196th, had killed many Americans in Korea. The thought gave him, he said, "a chill up the spine." Eric Sevareid, after touring Peking University, noted that the intellectual level was that of a U.S. junior college. "Today," he said, "China is counter-revolutionary as regards the human mind."

There was so much China coverage before the visit--and so much repetition during it--that some faithful viewers succumbed to an advanced case of deja vu. Part of the problem was the 13-hour time difference between Peking and New York. Live coverage of evening events reached the U.S. early in the morning and was repeated on the news that night. Even the President's visit to the Great Wall failed to provide the dramatic impact that might have been expected, and CBS canceled planned live coverage of his tour of the Forbidden City. "I just thought we'd had enough picture postcards." explained Richard Salant, the president of CBS News.

Members of what Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler refers to as "the writing press" were worse off. This was partly because the White House favored television and partly because Ziegler, as TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey cabled, seemed to "treat writers as an unnecessary evil." Print journalists complained that they were alone while the TV reporters came in teams with large supporting staffs. Some complaints seemed somewhat petty: TV network staffers were provided with cars, while writing journalists had to use buses.

Certainly the White House staff was only too happy to agree with Chinese wishes to withhold information on all top-level discussions. After the first Nixon-Mao meeting, Ziegler would not even pinpoint the location of Mao's home in Peking, or describe the refreshments. "Absurd," growled the New York Times''s Max Frankel, who was told it would be "fair to assume that tea was served." Arrangements for filing cables were fine. Phone calls were put through in a matter of minutes. But what to say?

Polite Reminder. In the scramble, it seemed that old China hands might fare better than the majority of the press. On hand, for example, was Public Broadcasting's Theodore H. White (The Making of the President), who covered China for six years as a TIME-LIFE correspondent and impressed his colleagues at the first press luncheon by asking a waitress in Mandarin to bring him green tea. But the Chinese proved courteously unenlightening to everyone. "A question about what happened to Deputy Premier Lin Piao," wrote Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, "produces a polite reminder to eat your spinach."

Analytical pieces, the so-called "thumb-suckers," were simply too risky to try on the basis of what was available. Even such an event as the two-page, seven-picture spread on the presidential visit in Peking's People's Daily, described by resident correspondents as "unprecedented," proved an enigma. The Washington Post's Stanley Karnow thought the display was "calculated to communicate to the Chinese population the advent of a new era in Sino-American relations." But A.P. Correspondent Frank Cormier cautioned that it might be aimed mainly at irritating the Russians.

Deprived of the customary briefings and backgrounders, correspondents were forced to fall back on color and trivia, including the length of Mao's handshake with Nixon and the width of Chou En-lai's grins as portents of how the talks were going. Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. fumed about the low-key reception and grumbled that the sole Chinese concession seemed to be that "they did not make President Nixon stop for red lights." Buckley eventually suggested in print that some slight was also intended because Chou drank "to the health" of President Nixon instead of toasting him directly. Of Nixon's performance he snapped, "I would not have been surprised if he had lurched into a toast of Alger Hiss."

Banner Headline. Proffered visits to nearly 40 industrial, cultural or historic sites proved interesting enough, but there was little room for individual enterprise. Detroit News Correspondent Jerry terHorst got a banner headline back home for his account of a visit to a Peking auto assembly plant. The New York Daily News made much of the observation by U.P.I.'s Norman Kempster that "Peking looks like a working-class neighborhood in The Bronx." Even when correspondents did make prolonged contact with responsive individual Chinese, as the Times's Frankel did with some students at Peking University, the results could be unnerving. One student said the bloodshed during the recent Cultural Revolution was necessary because it helped expose enemies of the people. Frankel: "Then why does Chairman Mao now say that violence is not the way?" Reply: "Because violence is not the way."

Inevitably, the readers tended to get stories about the low rents in Peking, the prevalence of bicycles, or the fact that stores were peddling pastel-colored Ping Pong balls. There was also copy about the comfortable press quarters at the Hotel of Nationalities where guests were supplied with pots of glue--because Chinese stamps, though colorful, are stickless. When word went round that a number of press visas might be extended well beyond the presidential visit, correspondents were quick to register their eagerness to stay.

Back in Washington Columnist Art Buchwald seemed happy enough to be left behind. Comfortably reflecting on the fact that Chairman Mao writes uplifting verse, Buchwald offered a collection of poems that President Nixon might quote back at him, in Mao's own florid style. To the harried word reporters in Peking, one was especially to the point:

As the sun sets over the

Yellow River And the moon rises in the

China Sea,

I reach to the stars with both hands Knowing I will be on

American TV.

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