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By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 14, 2000; Page C01

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 13 –– Ron Fournier was working the veepstakes story so hard he fell asleep in his recliner.

It was 3 o'clock last Monday morning, and the chief political writer for the Associated Press was in his Virginia home, using his ever-present cell phone to work the story of whom Vice President Gore would pick as his running mate. A return call woke him up after 5:30 a.m.--the source made him guess--and at 6:51 he moved the story that Joe Lieberman had gotten the nod, edging out the first national broadcast by NBC's Claire Shipman by mere minutes, an eternity in the wire service world.

Fournier may be the most important political reporter in the country, though you've probably never heard his name if you live in Washington, New York or here in L.A., where the big papers field their own political teams. One of the most dogged shoe-leather scribes around, Fournier can put a story on the national radar screen instantly, yet instinctively avoids the spotlight himself.

"He's got a hard-nosed way of asking tough questions in a soft way that elicits more information from a source than virtually any reporter I've ever run into," says Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush's spokesman. "He won't take no for an answer. He's driven."

"He's a major player," says Chris Lehane, Gore's spokesman. "He's indefatigable. He has called me from his summer hut up on the Canadian border at midnight on a weekend because he heard something. I talk with him a half-dozen to a dozen times a day. He's all over the place."

It's hardly surprising, therefore, that Fournier broke the news of most of the candidates getting into the presidential race, and most of them pulling out. The 37-year-old Detroit native knows how to make full use of the AP's clout.

"I have a pretty easy argument to make: I can get you in 1,600 newspapers across the country and in every TV station and radio station," he says. "Not a whole lot of reporters are able to sell their company that way. I try to sell the company more than myself."

Fournier has been known to tell reluctant sources, as a way of underscoring the AP's reach, that he lived in Arkansas for seven years and never saw The Washington Post.

The Arkansas connection was his ticket to Washington. After a stint at the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, where he ran the paper on weekends, Fournier moved to the Arkansas Democrat in the early 1980s, where he was soon covering Gov. Bill Clinton (and the competition against the now-defunct Arkansas Gazette was more intense than anything he would encounter in Washington). He jumped to the AP's Little Rock bureau in 1989, and when Clinton won the presidency, Fournier made a rare leap directly to the White House beat.

"He's as fair as they come, which is why people trust him," says CNN's John King, Fournier's predecessor, who found him "a little green" during the Clinton transition. "He has no ax to grind, no agenda to carry. I don't know if he's a Democrat, a Republican or an anarchist. He's a hunter and just goes after information."

"He's shamelessly aggressive," says former John McCain adviser Mike Murphy. "Often he's everyone's first call to get a story moving. He pushes very hard because he's in the speed-kills business."

Fournier won consecutive Merriman Smith Awards from the White House Correspondents' Association in 1997 and 1998--for stories on Clinton's second-term Cabinet appointments and his knee injury--before moving into the political analysis game. But this policeman's son has a dirty little secret that can be revealed here for the first time:

"To be honest with you, I'm not a political junkie," he says. "It's what I do for a living. I never really followed politics until I got into this business . . . If I wasn't paid to do this, I wouldn't give a crap until October.

"It can be extremely fulfilling when you take what a politician is saying and try to explain it to a lot of readers who don't have much more interest in politics than I do, . . . It's not that I think America has an overriding need to know one hour before Bush announces who his secretary of state is going to be. It's just a rush."

That rush is a bit harder to achieve in the Web era. Fournier says he lost the scoop about Gore hiring Bill Daley as campaign manager--he was on a plane at the time--to The Post's Web site, a new form of electronic competition that has eroded the AP's traditional advantage.

"I can't stand losing," Fournier says. "I'm extremely competitive at everything I do, from playing cards with my grandmother to trying to figure out who Bush's Cabinet secretaries are going to be."

The other reason Fournier isn't a familiar face is that he turns down most television interview requests, except for C-SPAN, under the old-fashioned notion that he should not be part of the story.

"Ron is oblivious to the spotlight," says Sandy Johnson, AP's Washington bureau chief. "He's an extremely nice, friendly reporter, not exactly the profile of a lot of Washington reporters."

Al Gets Gored

Gore had better hope he gets the kind of convention coverage that Bush drew on the Big Three evening newscasts. During the GOP love fest in Philadelphia, 60 percent of people interviewed on the newscasts praised the Texas governor, while 80 percent bashed the vice president, says a Center for Media and Public Affairs study.

More remarkably, from 1999 through Super Tuesday, 71 percent of the evaluations of Bush were favorable, compared with 46 percent for Gore. "This is a man-bites-dog story for Republicans, who love to hate the media," says center Director Robert Lichter.

Bloody Shame

Financial Times, the London-based newspaper, gets a nice bit of free publicity in TNT's new Wall Street drama "Bull," which debuts tomorrow. There are shots of the salmon-colored newspaper and a fictional FT reporter named Johnny Walker.

But the first episode may give the FT second thoughts about lending its name to the show. Walker is depicted as a sleazebag who knowingly passes a phony tip to a dealmaker, saying the Federal Communications Commission has approved a satellite slot for a wireless company the man is considering buying. "Using Walker's tip isn't exactly legal," the dealmaker tells an associate.

Walker, in double-agent fashion, then meets a source who had recently leaked him a front-page story.

"What did you tell him?" the source says.

"Exactly what you told me to tell him," Walker says.

"And he bought it?"

"He bought that and breakfast both." Good show--and bad journalism.