I watched or listened bits and pieces of last week's Democratic National Convention in Boston. Not very much. Kerry's and Edwards' speeches. A few others on the radio as I was walking home one night. Just enough to realize I wasn't missing much when I wasn't paying attention.
Media critics have lambasted the networks for the record-low coverage of the conventions. When ABC News' anchor Peter Jennings criticized the conventions for being overly scripted, his PBS counterpart Jim Lehrer said something to the effect, "We're not in the business of telling parties how to run their conventions. We're in the business of reporting news."
That's just it. The convention wasn't news. It was a glorified infomercial. One to which the taxpayers "contributed" about $14 million (the Republican shindig in NYC will get the same public booty). This despite both parties drowning in corporate brib...er, "donations."
CSPAN covered the entireity of the convention speeches uninterrupted. PBS offered 3 hours a night of coverage. I think ABC's digital channel did as well. Speeches were so tightly scripted and the convention platform was drafted in advance by Kerry's people, there was no reason for the networks to show anything other than the speeches of the two members of the ticket.
This isn't like 1952. Why were CBS, ABC and NBC being reproached for not showing exactly the same things in the same quantities as was available on several other media outlets such as CSPAN, PBS, NPR and the Internet?
And considering what coverage WAS provided, it hardly begged for greater quantity. Convention coverage on the networks as well as on cable channels like CNN and Fox News [sic], was pretty pointless. It exemplified everything that's wrong with American political journalism these days. The "reporting" was dominated by journalists taking to each other. It was dominated by commentators talking to yapping heads. It was spiced up with breathless reports of Ben Affleck and Michael Moore sightings. It was Entertainment Tonight, but for politics. The coverage from the Fleet Center was so agonizingly self-referential as to be irrelevant to citizens in the outside world.
Another problem I had was something else that's endemic in political journalism today. Instant pseudo-analysis. I watched Kerry's speech and before he was even off the stage, I had three yapping heads arguing with each other about how spectacular/horrible the speech was. Before I even had a chance to reflect and digest his words, a bunch of self-important yahoos were telling me what I should think.
If this is how they are going to cover political events, then the networks did us a favor by not subjecting us to it. At least their "reality" shows don't pretend to be anything more than they are.
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