EDFORD, N.H. - NBC booked the Bedford Village Inn for this week four years in advance, and now workers are putting the finishing touches on a glassed-in shed near the entrance so Tom Brokaw can broadcast the NBC Nightly News without getting his ears cold.
The inn's 150-person staff is scurrying to put each antique chair in place and make sure the pine trees are manicured so snow will ''fall to form,'' according to the director of sales.
Nothing so unpredictable as nature can be allowed to mar the deliberately quaint feel that makes this inn, owned by Jack and Andrea Carnevale, the most sought-after dining spot for media bigshots and campaign staffers. It's a place where out-of-towners can absorb olde New England atmosphere - and enjoy a glass of cabernet sauvignon and a slice of spiced pumpkin cheesecake to boot.
New Hampshire may be cherished by the national media and political establishment for its face-to-face, retail-style politics, but the love doesn't necessarily run both ways.
Today, as the latest six-month campaign closes with a frenzy of glitzy events and enough outside visitors to crowd every bar within 100 miles of Manchester, some local reporters and media critics say the whole spectacle -- what one commentator compared to a Hollywood production -- has left them cold.
''The Washington crowd arrives, and you'd think they were on location in the middle of a desert,'' said Patrick Griffin, a political consultant who lives in New Hampshire. ''They say things like, `There's endive here. Can you believe it? Can you believe you can actually get a real mineral water here?'''
''I don't think the national media takes New Hampshire very seriously,'' said Jim Graham, who's been covering Bill Bradley for the Concord Monitor.
Graham said that on a recent campaign stop, a woman told Bradley she couldn't afford health care coverage. When her small son came down with strep throat, he apologized for getting sick because he knew the family couldn't afford the medicine.
Bradley was moved to tears; the press, Graham said, was not.
Said Graham, ''The national media people have looked bored throughout this whole thing, and the first question is, `You got whomped in Iowa. If you do badly in New Hampshire, how long are you going to stay in the race?' I mean, come on.''
Local reporters from Iowa said they saw the same attitude during the recent caucuses, the only actual voting that takes place before New Hampshire. A producer for ABC phoned the Des Moines Police Department to ask whether they could break up the ice on the Des Moines waterfront so water could flow behind Peter Jennings during his broadcast.
Fat chance, said Rob Bersellino, who broke the story for the Des Moines Register.
''We can't even get the streets plowed,'' Bersellino said.
Bleary-eyed campaign staffers say meeting the sometimes arrogant demands of the national press corps can be exhausting. One member of President Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign remembers when a prominent former ABC reporter complained to campaign staffers because local cameramen had dared to eat from a buffet set up for members of the traveling press.
''It seemed like an overreaction to me,'' the former staffer said.
The reporter, who has since moved to another network, did not return calls to his office and hotel room in Manchester yesterday.
Still, many observers insist that the stereotype of the national media's arrogance might be overblown and that reporters deserve a decent meal and a good night's sleep after a hard day's work on the trail.
''Sometimes the media see themselves as the privileged class, which is not good for the media or for the citizens of this country who depend on them,'' said Tobe Berkovitz, a political consultant and professor at Boston University. ''But the fact is that it is also a very tough, hard grind to be a reporter on the political campaign trail. You do have to have a touch of empathy because it really is a 24/7 job.''
And local reporters aren't saints either, campaign aides say. One campaign staffer recalled how a local radio reporter tried to pressure him into paying for air time to announce his candidate's visit.
''I said that it wasn't a public service announcement - I just wanted to make sure they knew about it,'' the staffer said. ''I thought that a major presidential candidate coming to your community would be newsworthy, and they said, `Not in New Hampshire.'''
Resignation, with a touch of crankiness, defines many locals' feelings toward the swarms of politicians and journalists who descend on their communities every four years, Griffin said.
''We're used to it,'' he said. ''It's what we do.''
For many Manchester insiders, who treat each campaign season's attendant griping and hand-wringing about the media with the same seen-it-before attitude that greets each new report of global warming, the 2000 presidential campaign has brought with it an intriguing local subplot: the Bedford Village Inn, with a whirlpool in every room, has passed the renowned Wayfarer Inn and is now the hot hotel for visiting media celebrities - though its extravagance has raised further questions about whether the media is out-of-touch with local primary voters.
''The danger here is that these places are where the election industry meets and coheres,'' said Jay Rosen, the chairman of the Journalism Department at New York University. ''That can be quite insular and force journalists to regard the inside story and neglect everything outside.''
While the growing extravagance of media accommodations has some critics concerned, others think it's no big deal.
Declared Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, ''Where a reporter spends the night is not news unless it's in the bed of a candidate.''
