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For all the attention lavished on the two party conventions, most foreign reporters regarded them as anachronisms, heavier on rhetoric and glitz than substance, keyed more to the TV audience than to give-and-take among the delegates. "It's more a prime-time TV show than a convention," said John Wiseman of Network Ten Australia about the event in New Orleans. "Compared with Australian party conventions, which involve wheeling and dealing and political disputes, I find these conventions lacking in hard politics."
Most of the foreign journalists preferred covering the Democrats to the Republicans. "Jesse Jackson saved the whole convention in Atlanta," said Turkish Reporter Turan Yavuz. "If Bush would have announced his vice- presidential choice earlier, we'd all be walking around the French Quarter."
What turned out to be the most popular convention feature broadcast by West Germany's ZDF network was about itself. Assigned a trailer in the bowels of a garage near Atlanta's Omni Coliseum, ZDF staffers soon realized that a railway line ran right by their side of the building. When freights rumbled past, they had to hang blankets over the trailer's windows to dampen the noise while correspondents recorded their voice-overs. After a few days, the ZDF staff put together a lighthearted story comparing the dark netherworld of their trailer with the bright lights and glamour of the Omni Coliseum, where the Democrats were meeting. The story was a hit in West Germany and ran twice in translation on CNN; the ZDF home office ordered a similar story from the Republican Convention.
Most other foreign reporters could identify with ZDF's plight. Many complained that they were barred from certain briefings and often could not get an audience with political heavyweights. But the most consistent gripe concerned hotel accommodations. In Atlanta the Democrats assigned many foreign journalists to hotels 25 to 30 miles from the convention center. They were closer to the action in New Orleans, but many complained that the hotels assigned by the Republicans were second-rate and sometimes downright seedy. Alejandro Rodrigo, an Argentine working for Italy's ANSA news agency, described them as "below Third World standards."
Yo'av Karny, correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, was promised a hotel in New Orleans with room service and cable TV so he could follow the convention on CNN while he was writing. He arrived to discover that the hotel offered neither. Within two hours, the toilet in his room had flooded. And because he was made to pay for his entire stay in advance, he could not move. "American journalists expect to be treated imperially when they go abroad, and they are," said Karny. "I do understand priorities, but I expect some sort of reciprocity."
While Karny and other sole representatives of foreign newspapers will probably cover the 1992 conventions the same way they covered 1988's, some of the foreign television networks are already considering scaling back. "It's becoming too expensive, and all the debate is over before we get here," asserted Tony Naets, bureau chief of the European Broadcasting Union, an association of European broadcasters. Said Martin Bell of the BBC: "People back home are beginning to realize that these are not nominating conventions."