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<text> <title> (56 Elect) The Gutenberg Boys </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1956 Election </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> August 20, 1956 THE PRESS The Gutenberg Boys </hdr> <body> Into Chicago swarmed the biggest army of newsmen that ever surrounded any event anywhere. By the time all of the reporters, editors and background absorbers had shoved their way into place, their number would total some 4,000, roughly two newsmen for every delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Biggest reason for the record: TV and radio, whose electronic battalions outnumber other newsmen ("The Gutenberg boys," one TV producer calls them) almost two to one. But despite the fact that this year's national political conventions are geared for TV, the Gutenberg boys were themselves more numerous than ever, and were sure to top the record-breaking flood of 19,664,472 words that poured through Western Union wires from both conventions in 1952. Not only were many small-city dailies and weeklies covering a convention for the first time, but press associations and major papers beefed up their staffs (and more brass went along for the show). Some staffs, like the 100-man word-and-picture teams assigned by the Associated Press and the United Press, went on the job with intricate battle orders and (for photographers and messengers) identifying armbands to avoid confusion. As usual, the biggest staff representing a single daily was assigned by the New York Times, whose 19 men no doubt would file more words than any other newspaper's corps. (The Times will poach on the electronic preserve by using a TV circuit to send a daily ten-page, high-speed facsimile edition (circ. 25,000) to the Republican Convention in time for breakfast in San Francisco.) Map for Sunday Drivers. The expanded newspaper coverage is largely an unintended product of TV, which acts as a spur to competition. Because it whets reader interest in the conventions, TV is also serving in effect as a commercial for the printed word. Said Carroll Linkins, who has been one of Western Union's press shepherds at the national conventions since 1936: "If you see an event on TV, you want to read an expert to see if he saw what you did." Newspapers also needed bigger staffs to meet their readers' need for advance guidance on TV's vast convention operations. Edwin A. Lahey, Washington bureau chief of the Knight papers, sold his editors on doing a daily piece on what TV would show that evening. "It's like putting a map in a Saturday paper to help you take a Sunday drive," he explained. Keeping the Inside Track. Pad-and-pencil reporters had to admit that the first major news breaks of the preconvention week went to TV. Adlai Stevenson's support of a strong desegregation plank reached the public first on film in Newscaster John Daly's ABC show in an exclusive interview. Harry Truman's endorsement of Governor Averell Harriman was anything but exclusive; it came before a jammed ballroom of 800--probably the biggest press conference in history. But TViewers saw it as it happened. Yet, on the basis of convention history, the Gutenberg boys thought they would manage to keep the inside track. Said U.P. General News Manager Earl Johnson: "After almost every convention, you can put your finger on one development that foretold the final result. The development can be weeks before the delegates assemble or in an obscure room during convention week. Almost never does it happen before the TV cameras. The key to good convention coverage is to move in early with an experienced staff and canvass scores of sources day and night." <list> <l>August 27, 1956</l> <l>Platform Editor</l> </list> When the lights went up at the Democratic National Convention one night last week after the screening of a campaign film, National Chairman Paul Mulholland Butler stepped to the rostrum and spat out a challenge. Trembling with rage, Democratic Chief Butler snapped that "one of the major networks has failed to keep its commitment to present this documentary film to the American people." By pointedly thanking NBC and ABC for showing the movie, he put the finger on CBS as the offender. As a chorus of boos rose from the convention floor, some delegates stood, shook their fists at the CBS booth above and behind the rostrum and shouted, "Throw 'em out!" (Said one CBS reporter who was on the floor: "I thought they were going to smash our cameras".) Later, still fuming, toplofty Paul Butler charged "absolute sabotage," demanded that CBS carry the film with advance notice of its showing. No "Mere Conduits." Butler's blast caught CBS President Frank Stanton sitting in a convention box alongside Harry Truman's, sent him rushing to his network's backstage headquarters. There Sig Mickelson, CBS vice president in charge of the coverage, was already getting up the explanation: CBS had made no commitment to show the half-hour film, actually showed the last six minutes of it after carrying four brief interviews with politicos, fill-ins by four of its commentators, and a one-minute commercial. The network, said Mickelson mildly, was simply "exercising our news judgment" in what it chose to show. In a wire to his good personal friend Paul Butler, Stanton backed his staff. "I am shocked by your inflammatory attack," said the CBS chief. "Those who make the news cannot, in a free society, dictate to broadcasters, as part of the free press, to what extent, where, and how they shall cover the news. Television and radio...are not mere conduits which must carry everything which the newsmaker demands." Biting the Hand. Ever since Lawyer Butler came out of South Bend, Ind. to become Democratic chairman, he has persistently cried that the press--"the one-party press"--is unfair to Democrats. But his wail of "sabotage" against CBS was a case of biting off the hand that had been feeding him. CBS news coverage has been more than friendly to Butler's cause, and the punditing of its top commentators, Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid, has been sharply slanted toward the Democratic side. It was CBS that, out of its own pocket, set up hour-long closed-circuit telecasts last month so that Butler and Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall could give instructions to delegates in both conventions. CBS also made a kinescope of Keynoter Frank Clement rehearsing his big speech, and Stanton himself gave the Tennessee governor pointers on TV technique. Although Butler later tried to backtrack somewhat in his accusations, he pressed his demand for a CBS showing and again betrayed the chip he wears on his shoulder for the press at large. Petulantly, he hoped that "the infant medium of TV [will] not fall into some of the habits of the older medium of newspaper reporting." If CBS did not meet his demand, he threatened darkly, it might be inviting "legislation." "In the light of all the circumstances," CBS firmly refused to yield. Moreover, all three networks informed Butler that like editors of the older medium, they would go right on calling their own shots. The cub reporter of U.S. journalism had faced a challenge in its freedom, and had measured up. 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, 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 queuing 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 grim ("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. The Biggest Studio TV went to Chicago armed with better makeup artists, nattier dress and more fancy electronic gadgets than ever before. The show hardly lived up to its lavish pressagentry, but TV provided the nation with the most comprehensive coverage ever accorded a national political convention. The TV was occasionally halting, windy and inaccurate, but it had its moments of high drama. More important, it was always there. Creepie-peepies and walkie-talkies manned by hard-running TV reporters--notably ABC's Ed Morgan, CBS's Dick Hottelet, NBC's Merrill Mueller--peered, poked and pried into the remotest nooks of hotel rooms, train stations, nightclubs, and the convention hall itself. The three major networks called out their stables of old, reliable stars, and laid on a couple of new ones. CBS's veteran Walter Cronkite, working his familiar anchor spot, gave the most informed, alert and consistently lucid commentary, held up best under the week's strain. His biggest coup: getting Ave Harriman inside the fishbowl to exchange blessings with Estes Kefauver on a split-screen hookup (denounced as "electronic fakery" by rival ABC). CBS's seasoned twosome of Ed Murrow and Eric Severeid was seen only fleetingly, bantering the big picture with the casualness of network executives at a ball game. Runners-up in the honors department: NBC's able Chet Huntley and young (36), deadpan David Brinkley, who this year teamed up for the first time to add zest and drollery--a rare convention commodity--to the otherwise dull goings-on. Occasionally this new NBC team even had the edge on the traditionally good CBS reporting staff. ABC's anchorman, John (What's My Line?) Daly, made a virtue out of his chain's relative poverty (less gadgetry, smaller staff) by sticking with the action on the platform while the other webs cast about for sideshow pickups. Daly was the only anchorman who could actually see the convention from his box (the others watched it over monitor screens). ABC highlight: bulldogging Martin Agronsky corralling top delegates for debate, and consistently managing to make sense out of them. Trivia & Fluff. As always, the ubiquitous TV reporters caught some memorable glimpses: the unchivalrous disinterest of newspaper-reading delegates on ladies' day; NBC's pickup of the small but illuminating drama of Adlai Stevenson's reception for Mrs. Roosevelt; Bess Truman, behind dark glasses, nudging Harry in the ribs for speaking out of turn; bottle-bald Sam Rayburn (who did not submit to a dulling topsoil application of orange powder this time, as he did the last) threatening to shoot an admonishing finger right through the little glass screens in U.S. living rooms; the grin spreading across H.V. Kaltenborn's face as he watched Harry Truman (on film) impersonate Kaltenborn's clipped commentary in the 1948 elections (later, at Perle Mesta's wingding, Kaltenborn did an impersonation of Truman impersonating Kaltenborn). The relentless camera magnified the trivia and underlined the fluffs, caught the convention's heights and hollows--and its occasional signs of petulance and flippancy--Truman dressing down a reporter who was badgering him for an interview; Tennessee's Governor Clement Butler boiling mad over CBS's failure to run a documentary film. TV's impact on the convention was emphasized from the start, when Paul Butler surprised everybody by banging the gavel on time. And in a sense, TV itself could be blamed for much of the tedium. Almost every speaker, painfully conscious' of the camera's eye, addressed himself to "you who are watching TV." The galluses, the sweat, the unguarded gestures, the open shirts and bold-patterned ties were gone for good. But there were enough human bloopers to make up for the lack of old-fashioned fun. John Daly reported: "Mr. Rostrum stands in recess." Will Rogers Jr. (CBS) wound up a Stevenson interview with "Thank you very much, Governor Harriman" (Retorted Adlai: "Goodbye, Dave Garroway!"). Crooner Johnny Desmond muffed the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, and NBC's Monitor introduced Mrs. Roosevelt as "Eleanor Stevenson." Legs Crossed, Jackets Buttoned. Network rivalry hit a new peak. CBS posted a sign for its staffers: "Under no circumstances are you to patronize the NBC cafeteria." TV Reporter Vince Garrity caused an outraged flurry by flaunting ABC lapel pins in range of rival cameras. NBC went so far as to hire a professional lip reader to try to catch out-of-reach conversation, and ABC issued instructions to its staff: "Be sure when you are on camera, that you sit up straight, have your legs crossed modestly, and your jacket buttoned." The biggest problem was getting cameras into the right place at the right time. Sometimes the sheer magnitude of the new gadgets delayed the news. One NBC man got stuck on top of a 70-foot "hi-reach" camera and was forgotten. Twelve ABC men were wedged between electronic gear in a tiny booth until someone called a locksmith. Larry (Meet the Press) Spivak had to be rushed to a doctor to have a small speaker plug removed from his ear. Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson got hopping mad at CBS for "wrecking" his hotel suite, and no one could stand to look at NBC's five simultaneous pictures for very long. But overall, the networks did a fascinating job of hustling televiewers inside their biggest studio. To make things easier, they superimposed arrows and circles on the screen to single out key figures. NBC commentators loomed into view in the shape of triangles, sometimes peeped through keyholes. But as ABC's debearded (for TV) John Vandercook mused: "Sometimes I think we suffer from embarrassment of riches." </body> </article> </text>