I wasn’t obsessive about watching the DNC while it was in town — though I made a point to catch Biden’s speech, catching Bill Clinton’s too, and watched the main speakers on the closing night, too, particularly Gore and Obama.
As earlier noted, when I first clicked it on the other night, to CNN, which claimed it was covering the affair. Instead, it seemed to be more of an opportunity for CNN talking heads to visit Denver, or chit-chat their same theories, narrative, wild conjectures, and opinions about the election, candidates, and political zeitgeist. Ugh.
Guys, if I tune into CNN to watch the DNC (or the RNC), I’m not doing it to watch Wolf Blitzer, or Ted Koppel, or Suzie Creamcheese or Phil Phlack — I’m tuning in to watch the convention.
I flipped to MSNBC. Commercial.
I never tried PBS, but I did land on C-SPAN, which basically presented it all, in real time, as it happened — the good speakers, the poor speakers, the important speakers, the trivial speakers, plus all the music acts.
As I was at karate with Katherine yesterday afternoon, they had a big screen TV that had the coverage from CNN (I think). As I watched, I could see that a Colorado Democratic pol (Diane DeGette) was speaking — but the talking heads were too busy talking to each other to let me hear what she had to say. Why not just stay in Atlanta, guys, and save the air fare>
My karate class let out at 8pm last night, as Obama was being introduced, so I set the DVR up around 6:30 to just start recording, and so was able to FF through the music and the speakers I wasn’t interested in hearing. Note — I made that decision, not some producer in the sound booth.
An article weighing in on this: The TV Watch – On the Small Screen, Intimacy and Welcome Silence for Obama’s Big Rally – NYTimes.com
People do want to watch: the audience for cable news coverage this week was about double what it was in 2004. Yet despite the huge public fascination, the three major networks limited their coverage to an hour a night, a prime-time patchwork of highlight reels, catchup snippets of live speeches, and commentary.
And that’s fine — if you’re going to summarize, do it as a summary. That’s a legitimate way of doing it, in line with how they cover all news.
Anchors at conventions used to serve as omniscient narrators; at this convention, they mostly served as human V-chips blocking live speeches with their own palaver and predictions.
[…] And even the 24-hour cable news channels proved unreliable at times, giving too much screen time to their gassiest anchors.
Exactly. Cronkite talking about what’s actually happening at the convention is one thing. Suzie and Phil nattering about how it’s “playing,” or going through endless iterations of the whole Clinton PUMA* thang, is quite another.
Of the three cable news networks, CNN was the least intrusive: Wolf Blitzer and his colleagues were willing to let speakers speak for themselves.
When they were willing to let us hear them.
When Martin Luther King III spoke on Thursday, so did Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who chose to entertain his viewers with a Doonesbury cartoon about Mr. Obama and the Clintons that also featured Mr. Olbermann and his co-host, Chris Matthews. (Fox News mostly focused on Mr. McCain’s possible choice for a running mate, but raced back to the convention when Sheryl Crow took the stage.)
It’s a bad reading of the audience. For most of the convention, CNN — staid, stable and anchored by fewer egomaniacs — won higher ratings than the other cable news channels, as well as ABC and CBS. And Wednesday, CNN was neck and neck with NBC, and for a while even ahead, suggesting that when a political event is this interesting, television commentators are less so.
Which is fine, though I’m disappointed that the PBS and C-SPAN coverage weren’t mentioned by the Times.
Ah, well, I’m glad it’s over … until next week.
(via Margie)
* I realized the other day I’d heard started hearing this term all over the place, had a contextual sense of what it meant, but didn’t know the actual definiton: “Party Unity My Ass”.
I found that MSNBC’s internet feed to be perfect. Live feed camera shots of the full convention….and absotively no talking heads to filter out or talk over the speakers.
My 2 cents is that this all started in 2000, during the debates and then in the conventions. During the debates, folks watched and then the talking heads came on and told folks to not believe their lieing eyes and ears, and then in the conventions they censored it and then spun it the way they wanted….and then winnowed it down further to the talking points/narrative they wanted with sound bites.
Yeah, it would be great if they went back to the old days of covering the conventions instead of making it American Idol.
P.S.
There are two PUMA groups, both run and funded by GOP ops. One is Party Unity My Ass, and the other is People United Means Action.
I was watching the PBS coverage lst night and there were a series of ‘real people’ speakers who wowed me. Pam and the Barney Smith were both Republicans with stories as to why they were voting for Obama. Barney Smith had the best line of the ENTIRE night. After elaying his story of losing his job as the factory moved overseas he said: “I need a governement that cares more for Barney Smith than Smith Barney.’ Brilliant!
I prefer to just grab the speeches themselves off YouTube. 45 minutes of Obama accepting the nomination, uninterrupted, with no annoying crawl at the bottom: priceless.
Ah. I see I am hopelessly retro in how I get my convention coverage. Internet feeds and YouTube are obviously the way that all the Cool Kids do it. Doubtless read through their iPhones. 🙂
I had no idea that PUMA was an actual organization(s), vs simply being a generic label. Even goofier.
Arty, yeah, the Barney Smith/Smith Barney line was awesome. 🙂
I also liked Al Gores:
Yes, that one drew a good chuckle.