Gop Finds That It’s All In The Timing

The TV networks are steamed.

The networks are so ticked off that they are threatening to take their ball - uh, I mean, their cameras and microphones - and go home.

Ted Koppel of ABC packed up his “Nightline” program and left town ahead of schedule because he was disgusted with the way the Republicans were running their national convention.

A front-page story in USA Today speculated that the 1996 political conventions might be the last to receive live network TV coverage.

Why are the networks so fed up? Why are NBC, CBS and ABC inclined to wash their hands of this great American tradition, the presidential nominating convention?

Because, for once, the Republican Party outsmarted the networks. Because the Grand Old Party figured out a way to beat the networks at their own game, a way to communicate with the American people without allowing the networks to filter and distort the information that was being communicated.

The casual viewer may not have even noticed it, but the Republicans devised a format that totally thwarted the networks’ proclivity for analyzing the convention into the ground, for creating controversy where none existed, for ignoring convention news in favor of destructive rumor-mongering.

Convention organizers accomplished this feat by staging an extravaganza that was as tightly formatted as an evening news program or a video countdown show on MTV.

For the first time ever, convention business was scheduled right down to the minute. Most speeches were limited to 10 minutes in length, and many were illustrated with video clips. Convention planners even anticipated TV commercial breaks and did their best to schedule important business around the commercials.

The result of all this was that the networks became virtual pawns of the convention organizers, instead of the other way around, which had been the case in the past.

Because there were no long, boring speeches and no extended lulls in the action, the networks were extremely limited in their ability to flood the convention floor with reporters determined to stir up trouble.

It didn’t hurt, either, that the Republicans held their get-together in the San Diego Convention Center, a hall so small and crowded that most reporters couldn’t have traveled from one side to the other if they’d had the San Diego Chargers blocking for them.

The frustrated networks evidently made a conscious decision to deal with all this by insulting their audience at every opportunity: chit-chatting through important speeches; cutting away for commercials during compelling presentations such as Monday night’s magnificent video tribute to former President Ronald Reagan; constantly making snide remarks about the GOP’s game plan.

The networks’ petulance brought them only further grief: Viewers who wanted to see the actual convention rather than some analyst’s interpretation of the convention simply switched to C-SPAN, which carried gavel-to-gavel coverage without commentary, or to Cable News Network, which telecast large portions of the proceedings.

If you watched any of the call-in shows offered by C-SPAN when the convention was out of session, you know that caller after caller gushed: “I’m so grateful for C-SPAN’s coverage. It lets me make up my own mind instead of having some liberal commentator tell me what to think.”

The downside to the Republicans’ format - there’s always a downside, isn’t there? - was that it diminished the spontaneity of the convention. Half the fun of a political convention, especially for those inside the hall, is getting caught up in the excitement created by a barn-burner of a speech or being bored into a coma by some long-winded orator who should have been gagged and dragged off the podium by his heels.

Until Wednesday night, when Bob Dole was officially nominated for president after a spectacular appearance by his wife, Elizabeth, and a heart-tugging nominating speech by Sen. John McCain, the convention had been sorely lacking in excitement.

But what the heck. A mild case of drama deprivation is a small price to pay for sticking it to the TV networks.