Networks Seek New Approach to Campaigns : By departing from the beaten path, journalists hope to make election stories more relevant.

WASHINGTON —  Can the news media improve the quality of political campaigns?

Network television journalists are asking that question now as they anticipate the 1992 presidential election. And the question implies that if campaigns recently have seemed mean-spirited or trivial, the media share some blame.

Perhaps the most concrete effort to rethink television’s role in campaign reporting has come at NBC. Bill Wheatley, the network’s director of political coverage, spent last semester at Harvard’s Shorenstein Barone Center for media and politics considering new approaches.

Wheatley’s paper will be published next fall, but his ideas are already influencing NBC’s planning. He argues that the press must treat elections as if they were “referenda on the future,” a debate on where the country is headed rather than a mere contest of winners and losers.

Today, campaigns too rarely debate such questions, Wheatley says, and the news media do too little to help.

A study of television and print in 1988 sponsored by the Markle Foundation, for instance, found that more than 65% of press coverage focused on who was winning, on campaign tactics and on public opinion polling. Only 10% dealt with policy issues, and 20% with candidate qualifications.

To change that, Wheatley suggests that the media should first work to identify the key challenges facing the nation.

Then the press should focus its coverage on “the ability and the inclination of the candidates to display the leadership necessary to address those challenges.”

“If you decide what is important in a campaign is recording what the candidates say, then you will get a certain kind of coverage,” Wheatley says. “If you decide determining who is going to be elected is the principal question, then you will get another kind of coverage. And if you decide to focus your reporting on what challenges face the country and how the candidates might deal with them, you will get still a different type of reporting.”

Making leadership the focus is also different, Wheatley says, from focusing on issues--as the media traditionally vows to do at the start of each presidential campaign.

Focusing on leadership and qualifications, he argues, would present issues in a way that would help voters make up their minds.

“If you have the opportunity to interview a candidate, rather than getting bogged down in how many submarines we need in the nuclear triad, you might be better off if you tried probing the candidate’s general philosophy toward nuclear weapons and their use.”

Part of this will involve just saying no to some staged events. “The American public deserves to know what is going on on the campaign trail,” Wheatley says, but if the candidates are “sounding the same theme for the fourth straight day and we have covered that . . . a better use of our air time would be to say the candidates didn’t make any news today. So tonight, our political report deals with how each might change the makeup of the Supreme Court.”

Others inside network television share Wheatley’s concerns.

Dottie Lynch, director of the political polling unit at CBS, believes the media need to be less cynical and make stories more relevant to ordinary voters. When the Democratic Leadership Council met recently, for instance, much of the press coverage focused on such “inside baseball” questions as whether Jesse Jackson got to speak.

A working mother rushing to put dinner on the table would have been more interested in West Virginia Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV’s speech concerning health care, she says, or Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr.’s ideas about taxes. But the media have gotten too jaded to take them seriously.

Some political professionals are skeptical the media can change.

“Who established these people to be the agenda setters?” asks Republican consultant Eddie Mahe. It is up to the candidates, not the media, to define the key campaign issues, he says, and in any case, “the press can’t write in a sustaining way about something that the candidates aren’t talking about themselves.”

Wheatley says he does not want to set the agenda, only add to the mix. “You can’t predict leadership with any certainty,” he says, “but you can at least point to signposts and warning signs.”