An Olympic-sized opportunity missed: Cocktail-party chatter, not useful Convention TV coverage

[DeepModem Mom]

Media Matters for America: An Olympic-sized opportunity missed
by Jamison Foser

You wouldn't know it from watching television this week, but political conventions are about far more than politics. They are about policy, about embracing the successes of the past and preparing for the challenges of the future. They are the parties' best opportunity to share their visions for America with the people who will decide which course we will take. And because a nation is not defined by lines on a map but by the ideals it stands for, conventions are about America itself -- who we are, what we'll do, and what we won't.

It was easy to lose sight of that while watching television coverage of the Democratic convention this week. Not because the convention speakers weren't talking about policies and values and ideals -- they were -- but because the media wasn't paying much attention to any of that. Instead, the media treated the convention as purely a political matter -- are the Democrats unified? Should they criticize President Bush and Sen. John McCain more? Was Sen. Hillary Clinton's speech good enough? Too good? (No, really: several journalists suggested that might have been the case.) How many pronouns did she use? Will Sen. Barack Obama get a "bounce" in the polls? ABC's convention coverage actually featured Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts channeling Republican mockery of the stage design for Obama's speech by chanting "Toga! Toga!" Yes, that really happened.

Watching television coverage of the convention, with the relentless focus on what the Democrats should do, whether they did it well enough, what they didn't do but should have, and how people would react to it, it often seemed that many journalists don't really have much interest in journalism; they'd rather play armchair campaign manager.

The media's obsessive focus on what the Democrats should be doing and how they should be doing it is, of course, a spectacular waste of time. But it's worse than that: It squanders the attention of the American people, during one of the weeks when they pay the most attention to the presidential campaign. Tuesday night, 26 million viewers watched Hillary Clinton's speech, nearly as many as the 27 million U.S. viewers NBC's Olympics coverage averaged per night. More than 38 million people watched Barack Obama's speech Thursday night -- more than watched the Olympics opening ceremony, the final American Idol, and the Academy Awards this year. It's possible that most of those viewers were tuning in to hear Chris Matthews' assessment of who is and is not a "regular person" (answer: middle-aged white men). But it seems more likely that they were watching for more substantive reasons -- if they wanted to watch journalists playacting at being campaign strategists, the cable news channels would probably have significantly higher ratings during non-convention weeks.

So there was a huge audience -- an Olympic-sized audience -- tuning in to watch a political convention; a perfect opportunity for the media to help voters educate themselves about the parties and candidates -- what they've done, whether it worked, what they say they'll do, and how it will likely affect the country.

Instead, readers and viewers were treated to an endless parade of journalists substituting cocktail-party chatter for useful coverage....

http://mediamatters.org/items/200808290013?f=h_latest

[DeepBlueC]

1. well said