CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Discussing the Budget: Zzzzzz-z-z-z

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February 11, 1995, Section 1, Page 48Buy Reprints
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No, the national budget is no O. J. Simpson. Still, one might assume it has enough significance as a news story to sustain upscale interview programs. But like other economic matters, budgets give television the shakes. Everyone takes a shot at the subject, but it keeps confounding the pros.

On Sunday, "Meet the Press" brought on two masters of Senate and tube: Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who is leading the resistance to a balanced-budget amendment, and Bob Dole of Kansas, the Majority Leader, to discuss "Balanced Budget: To Be or Not to Be?"

Despite a long-perfected ability to ooze enough sanctimony on any subject to besmear every television screen in the land, Senator Byrd did lay out some specific objections to the proposed amendment before soaring into a celebration of the American Constitution and his devotion, with God's support, to that excellent document.

Maybe, if asked, he would have elaborated on his objections, but he was spared that effort by his interviewers. Tim Russert, Lisa Myers and Robert Novak were interested mainly in the chances of the amendment's passage. It was a common display of Washington reporters' fascination with process over substance. After all, it's more fun reporting on political spats than on policy intricacies, and deep down, many reporters would rather be sportscasters.

Once Senator Dole came on, the budget dispute was lost altogether in chitchat about his Presidential ambitions, the part his wife might play in his Administration and such grabbers. It was not unenlightening. Mr. Dole, who to his credit rarely draws attention to his war injury, managed to get in references to it twice in his 20 minutes or so on "Meet the Press" and conceded that he had made a mistake by impersonating a mean politician in his previous tries for national office.

This time, to judge by his appearances on television and radio in the last year or more, he is playing the good guy. What incarnation he will adopt if his new persona fails awaits another program. But by the end of the hour, viewers had learned more about Mr. Dole than about what a balanced budget or the President's budget proposal might mean for the country.

On that same day, ABC's "This Week" made a more strenuous effort to get into the pros and cons of budget-cutting, beginning with a useful report by Jack Smith. Both David Brinkley and George F. Will pressed Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget, on the hard choices facing budget-cutters. Mr. Will ventured so far as to try to get Ms. Rivlin to say something one could understand about the relation between the budget and interest rates, and even Sam Donaldson, the Robert Novak of the middling left, avoided treating the subject as if it were a wrestling match.

Well, Ms. Rivlin, though obliging by Washington standards, was not in a particularly giving mood; she had come to ABC, after all, to praise the Administration budget (which, it is understood, she did not really like too much), not to bury it. The Republican gravediggers followed: Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, and Representative John R. Kasich, Republican of Ohio, bashed the President's budget but disclosed little about their own plans. Fulminations took over, and everyone turned with relief to easily grasped, old-fashioned politicking. By the end Mr. Donaldson, back in form, was speculating on a Dole candidacy.

Over at CBS, the "Face the Nation" interviewers, Bob Schieffer, presiding, and Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal, asked questions that were sufficiently nervous-making to send their Republican guests, Representative Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana and Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, scampering away from mentions of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and most other specifics on how their party would go about getting the budget into balance.

The peppiest of the day's encounters, on CNN's "Late Edition," between Ms. Rivlin and Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, left the impression that both political parties were hoodwinking the nation. It also provided further evidence that a "you're-worse-than-we-are" debate is not the best way to illuminate a complicated matter.

If the windy charges and evasions of their guests were not enough, the network teams were also stymied by the standard format: a few minutes for this line of questioning, a few minutes for that, a break for a commercial. It is an unyielding format that hedges in all network news programs.

Even the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS suffers from the reluctance of television interviewers to push ahead for very long against the resistance of partisans and the attention spans of viewers. (The patient and penitent are presumably tuned to C-Span.) Unlike Senator Dole's personality changes, budgets just do not make for sexy conversation.

Yet by persisting with focused reports and interviews once a week or more, the PBS program does better at squeezing facts out of the guest filibusterers. So speaking of budgets, Mr. Will, that's another reason for continued support of public television.