McCarter: Broken News

NEWSWEEK's new cultural critic Jeremy McCarter--late of New York magazine--posts a must-read essay on the insanity of cable TV convention coverage. This is exactly what I'd say on the subject if I were as smart as Mr. McCarter:

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.

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."

It's like the old koan about a tree falling in a deserted forest, except this time, there are a bunch of witnesses swearing that it didn't make a sound. Welcome to the team, sir. 

READ THE REST HERE.