The View from the Bus

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Life is hectic on a package tour with potential Presidents The two dozen reporters who sat slumped in the lobby of the Ramada Inn in Keene, N.H., had been waiting for Walter Mondale for almost three hours when the announcement finally came that the bus was ready for boarding. They gathered their gear, slogged through ankle-deep slush, and were just settling into their seats when word filtered down the aisle: "He's going to answer something." No one knew what Mondale would be asked, or by whom, but they grabbed their notebooks and, grumbling and muttering, trudged back to the lobby. As it turned out, most of the reporters did not even bother to write down Mondale's remarks. Yet, as they reminded themselves, at least they had been there, just in case. That scene is typical of the life of presidential-campaign reporters, who are known, with only slight gender inaccuracy, as the boys on the bus.

News organizations have been reporting from the pre-election trail with some consistency for nearly a year, and by last week the entourages of journalists far outnumbered the candidates and their traveling staffs. News personnel aboard the bus (or plane or van) can enjoy intimacy with a potential President: John Glenn, for example, has led a group sing-along of gospel and folk tunes, and shakes hands with the regulars at the end of a swing. But at every stop, the journalists are faced with a candidate's standard speech, the same jokes, the same badinage, and must try to turn them into news. As ABC Correspondent Brit Hume joshed to Mondale's press secretary Maxine Isaacs after a blur of indistinguishable events: "We regulars have had our excitement threshold lowered." Like the White House beat, to which it is often a steppingstone, campaign coverage is one of the most coveted and also one of the most confining of assignments. Reporters frequently join the candidate at dawn and may touch down in three or four states before hitting the next hotel bed at midnight. Traveling journalists, like other clients of arranged tours, tend to rehash the details of the day's events, or fret about mediocre food, lack of sleep or insufficient time to do laundry. On one demanding day, the reporters with Glenn set out at 7 a.m. and were given no opportunity to eat until 10 p.m. Recalls the Boston Globe's Walter Robinson: "By then, we were getting abusive with the candidate." Most of the reporters on the buses are young -- in their 20s or 30s -- white and male.

One notable exception is the group accompanying Jesse Jackson: ABC, NBC and CBS have consistently included blacks among the producers or reporters sent to cover him, as have the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and TIME. Perhaps half of the journalists in the entourages are new to covering national campaigns. Says Bernard Weinraub, a veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times: "It looked like something that I ought to try once, and now that I have, once seems like it may be the right number." But many an editor or pundit -- a "big foot," in the parlance of the bus -- enjoys returning to the trail occasionally. Says Des Moines Register Editor James Gannon: "I go to see the reporters, who are my pals, as much as the candidates."

Almost from the moment that Timothy Grouse published his colorful 1973 critique, The Boys on the Bus, which portrayed many campaign reporters as engaging in passive, unimaginative "pack journalism," major news organizations have searched for other ways to cover the candidates. For this primary season, the Washington Post has switched from "man-to-man" to "zone" coverage: reporters are assigned to regions of the country, and join up with each candidate in succession as he travels through. The Post's Martin Schram, a veteran of the past four campaigns, takes that approach a step further: whenever possible he rents a car, rather than travel in what he calls "the steel cocoon." He explains, "The reporter on the bus may get a good idea of how well one candidate is doing, but learns very little about how he is doing relative to others. The reporter on the ground gets a much better sense of what the outcome will be, and why."

The Los Angeles Times has twelve campaign reporters; only two of them travel full time with individual candidates, and those two often swap assignments. Times National Editor Norman Miller points out that reporters who remain in the cocoon not only run the risk of getting stale, but are apt to lose perspective; they can become focused on what he calls the "inside baseball" of strategy. Says he: "It does not help a person to make a choice on whom to vote for if we go on about how good an organization someone has in Iowa."

The TV networks are also de-emphasizing daily stories from the bus or plane. Says CBS News Vice President Joan Richman: "We have made some effort this year to report the campaign in a broader context and to lessen the sort of fragmentary coverage you get when your only reporting is from each individual candidate." CBS Correspondents Susan Spencer and Lem Tucker have been encouraged to step back from the Mondale and Glenn buses to work on "big picture" stories. Other analytical pieces on specific issues or themes have been done by each network's senior political reporters.

As always, one of the campaign's most sensitive issues is how much the "longshot candidates get covered. Jesse Jackson, as the only black, was followed even before he officially announced, and after his successful mission to Syria to negotiate the release of downed U.S. Airman Robert Goodman, the attention sharply increased. After Glenn slipped in the poll standings, more notice was given to Gary Hart. But there is still scant coverage for Alan Cranston, George McGovern, Ernest Rollings or Reubin Askew. Stories about the "second tier" of candidates, moreover, tend to dismiss them as having no chance to win.

To offset this, these candidates can try to play to the local press. Says Hart: "Routinely, the coverage from local newspapers and TV is three-quarters quotes from what I said -- and they get it right -- and the reporters do not feel the need to characterize my campaign in the way the national press has, as faltering, halting or any of those gratuitous words." Hart notes a chicken-and-egg dilemma: candidates who have not done well by conventional measures, such as poll standings and funds raised, tend to receive scant and negative national coverage, which in turn makes it difficult for them to raise funds and attract supporters.

One way journalists try to resolve the problem is to write issue stories that treat the candidates equally. Another method is to run profiles of each candidate, with an emphasis on personality and attitudes as well as ideology, as the wire services, major newspapers and the networks are doing. Says ABC News Political Director Hal Bruno: "We get into what makes the man himself tick. The most important issue is character -- the personality and the ability of the candidate."

A further means of achieving balance is to scrutinize front runners more rigorously than their rivals. Although few journalists have examined the budget proposals of the second-tier Democrats, the Wall Street Journal dug into the complex question of whether Mondale was making extravagant pledges to interest groups with out specifying how he would pay for the programs. The Journal concluded: "An examination of his campaign promises indicates he will have to fit more than $45 billion -- and by some calculations almost twice that -- of new commitments into a $9 billion hole allotted for new spending." Mondale replied that the story was "distorted and misleading." As Jesse Jackson has achieved prominence, he too has begun to receive more challenging coverage, including stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times about large grants by Arab nations to the civil rights organization he founded, PUSH.

For most journalists, the trickiest issue is whether to forecast the result of the battle weeks before the first vote is cast. Last week Lisa Myers of NBC reported, "Mondale's candidacy has taken on an air of inevitability, and that has begun to dry up money and resources his rivals need to keep the inevitable from happening." Many of the reporters on the buses privately agree with Myers. But they question whether it is appropriate for journalists to make such a judgment. They also express uneasiness over the way the dark horses are often ignored. Warns the Post's Schram: "The campaigns of 1972 and 1976 stand as examples of how long shots managed to survive despite the spotlight on front runners."