Lessons learned -- one convention down, one to go

By Barry Garron

If you really care about what gets said at the political conventions, what network should you watch? After four days of Democratic activity, I realize there is no easy answer.

The broadcast networks, with their "be-grateful-for-the-one-hour-we-give-you" attitude, missed the boat. This is a historic election for many reasons, and there is enormous public curiosity. One hour is not nearly enough to summarize the speeches, analyze the content and report on the impact inside and outside the convention hall.

Someday, historians will struggle mightily to understand how, for example, NBC can justify a couple hundred hours of network time for gymnastics and beach volleyball but only eight hours to set the stage for what is arguably the most significant event on the planet this year.

So what's left? There's Fox News, if you like your coverage tilted to the right, or MSNBC, if you favor a more leftward bent. Instead, I gravitated to CNN and PBS.

The best thing about CNN, at least in my home, is that I got it in high definition. Second best, it provided some reasonably good analysis, especially from David Gergen but also from Gloria Borger and John King. I tuned to CNN for most major speeches and a little reaction afterward.

Every time CNN was on, though, I wished I had the power to remove all of those distracting elements that some consultant with attention deficit disorder told them people wanted to see. I didn't need an omnipresent box telling me what day of the convention this was. I sure didn't need lights dancing up and down to tell me the noise level on the convention floor (thankfully, they got rid of them).

Like the other cable news operations, CNN talked over many of the speeches, including some significant ones. (I gave up on MSNBC when it covered over the John Kerry speech, considered by many to be the best one given at the convention after Barack Obama's acceptance speech.)

Most of all, I didn't need the historical trivia that told me over and over again that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first nominee to deliver an acceptance speech in 1932 or that, in 1936, a black person was a delegate for the first time. With all due respect to history and the makers of "Trivial Pursuit," the sequential flashing of these facts was hugely annoying.

That left PBS. It had all the speeches of significance. It had a small number of analysts, all of them with more wrinkles than their counterparts but also more cogent observations. If only the picture I got from Dish had been sharper, or just less grainy, I don't think I would have picked up the remote for the entire night.

It took a while, but I now have a TV viewing game plan for when the GOP on Monday starts telling me how much better off I am than I was eight years ago.

Comments

[Lenni]

I watched C-SPAN most of the time. Gavel to gavel coverage with no annoying pundit voiceovers (and a minimum of unnecessary graphics). Since it's all shot with pool cameras, every network has identical video anyway, but only C-SPAN doesn't muck it up with verbose pundits and news crawls. They also show all the speakers, unlike MSNBC that didn't even bother to show John Kerry's speech... instead they opted for even more "expert" on-camera analysis. I guess they think that 20 hours a day of their panel repeating their opinions ad nauseum is more important than actually covering what's going on at the convention itself.

I also got to see the entire pre-speech celebration/concert on C-SPAN Thursday night. Very cool.

[OldOldLady Of The Hills]

C-Span is THE place. The only place! Thank God for it! All the rest? HELP!