How a floor reporter works a cut-and-dried convention
NBC's Chris Wallace was getting edgy. He was supposed to interview Ron Reagan, the President's son, on the Republican Convention floor under the signpost of the New York delegation. But his interviewee, it turned out, was many yards away, under the standard of New York's alternates. Wallace ran to the Reagan seats in the VIP box, then circled the floor. By the time the misunderstanding was discovered, the "window" of open air time had passed.
For Wallace, the missed interview made three nights in a row of minor irritations. On the convention's first evening, he looked for moderates who dissented from the platform, but three people on his list were away from their seats, and a fourth declined to be openly critical, so he had to switch gears and interview a skeptic from the right, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. The next night Wallace's scheduled interview with Barbara Bush, the Vice President's wife, was truncated to two questions. But he had good luck as well: he had perhaps the clearest line to the convention's instant media celebrity, Susan Catania, an Illinois delegate who was clamored after because she had decided not to vote to renominate Reagan. Wallace covered her a decade ago, when she was a state legislator and he a local TV reporter in Chicago.
For most of the 13,000 journalists at the convention, the main topic of conversation was how hard it was to find a story. Said Walter Cronkite: "Up to now, the dullest one I ever covered was the 1956 convention that renominated Eisenhower. But this here may well win." There was almost no conflict, surprise or suspense, none of the drama that TV thrives on. Thus network floor reporters like Wallace had to hustle to find interviews that would get onto the air. They had no breaking news to follow, no deep divisions to exemplify. They did not even have many big names to interview: more than ever, the party's major celebrities were being taken up to the anchor booth.
Yet for Wallace, 36, a true political junkie who worked his first convention in 1964 as Cronkite's errand boy, being a floor reporter is "the most intense experience you can have." In 1980, Wallace scooped the other networks, albeit by seconds, on the choice of George Bush as Ronald Reagan's running mate, and that coup helped win him a job as NBC's White House correspondent. At the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, he screened out rivals from an exclusive interview with Joan Mondale by having his crew and her aides form a human fence. Last week he was able to use more traditional tactics, prearranging talks with party elders like Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada. Between glances at his color-coded floor map and scurrying to his next "target of opportunity," Wallace described his convention role as "part journalist, part producer, part booking agent, part offensive lineman." He might have added, part agent provocateur. Like his father, CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace, Chris has an instinct for seeking out controversy, sometimes for arousing it. He described his feisty exchange with Helms, who accused journalists of distorting Reagan's policies, as "a pretty fair tennis match."