DID DEMOCRATS WASTE FIRST DAY? blared a graphic beneath Larry King's chin. The Monday-night program of the Democratic National Convention had ended a couple of hours earlier, and King wanted the assembled pundits to tell him whether the party has mishandled its big event. The question is rich with irony. Precisely because of the pundits, who can even tell what the Democrats did on their first day, much less decide how well or badly they did it?
Time after time last evening, I flipped from the wall-to-wall coverage on C-Span—which is viewed, I imagine, largely by shut-ins and political completists—to see how CNN or MSNBC or Fox News broadcast a speech or performance. Time and again, they weren't broadcasting it at all. Instead, talking heads were talking to other talking heads about Hillary's dead-enders, or some other overblown story, at self-parodying length. The resulting coverage had about as much connection to what happened onstage last night as NBC's Olympics coverage would have had if Bob Costas had spent two full weeks asking other sportscasters how they feel about the shot put.
There's nothing criminal about networks dropping millions to fly all those cameras to the Rockies and then barely pointing them at the stage (that soothing, soothing stage: at the Pepsi Center, there is not a Red America or a Blue America, there is a pinkish-teal America). Nor is there anything surprising about the decision of a seller (the cable news shows) veering away from a commodity (the live feed) to offer a value-added product (bloviation about the live feed), particularly at an event everybody dismisses as an infomercial. But tonight's silly circus demonstrated how distorting and unattractive this self-absorption can be.
Consider the early conventional wisdom about last night: that the Democrats didn't spend much time hitting the Republicans. That's true, insofar as organizers didn't think it would be dignified to have two history-making speakers share the stage with a McCain piñata. But just because nobody got to hear the whacking doesn't mean no whacking occurred. Multiple members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Sen. Amy Klobuchar blasted McCain before prime time. Later, America caught a glimpse of Nancy Pelosi getting off a good line, saying that McCain does indeed have experience—"experience in being wrong." But many fewer people heard the even better line from Margie Perez, who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and said, "America can't afford to let John McCain drown our hopes in more of the same failed policies."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/155647I remember when convention coverage was much different. The talking heads were the short breaks, and there were many reporters on the convention floor talking to everybody. Now I have no idea what is really going on. Most people who are watching are seeing the network version. I'm so tired of listening to analysts talk to analysts about what another analyst said.:rant:
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