Broken News

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."

There's no mystery to why Blitzer et al didn't linger on some of this stuff, consigning it to their online video streams. Much of it was boring; some of it was downright creepy. (If it's wrong for Bush to have a fake town hall with only his supporters, it's wrong for Democrats to let Sen. Sherrod Brown MC a fake town hall, a Potemkin panel to celebrate Obama and criticize McCain.) But you'd think somebody other than C-Span would get out of the way for a while and let the country make up their minds on the subject.

Even when the sheer weight of events compelled a moment of silence from the pundits, the self-aggrandizement endured. When Ted Kennedy walked a little unsteadily to the podium, and Maria Shriver began to weep—how much of our history is punctuated by Kennedys weeping?—it reminded you of all the crushing sacrifices the family has made in their lives of public service. Kennedy vowed to be back in Washington in January, but this could have been the last of the many ringing speeches he's made to the nation, a final declaration that "The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on." Still he had to share the screen with news tickers and network promotions and inane convention trivia. Has the man not earned, at this point, seven minutes of our undivided attention?