A Creaky Political Tradition Meets A Nimble Digital Media
Journalists, as a rule, are pretty good complainers. Conventions bring
out some of our best.
Come stand in line at the poetically named “Concession Stand” here in
the basement of the Charlotte Convention Center for a few minutes and
you’ll hear what I mean. “Uhgh, what is it about America and fried food?
I’d kill for anything green,” sighs one Francophone reporter to his
colleague. “What? No! It’s like a soggy armpit out there!” shouts a
young woman into her mobile phone, blocking the soda machine. The
impatient man with the media tags behind her rolls his eyes and puts his
hand to his face in a pantomime of a cell phone screamer. (To be fair,
much of the food here is fried, and Charlotte has been awfully damp.)
Criticism is something that comes naturally to journalism. It’s part of
the job. But when it comes to finding ways to explain slow and complex
moving processes – like conventions or American politics – we can
struggle.
Every junior reporter knows how easy it can be to report on a house
fire: it happened, dramatic footage, sympathetic victims, just the
facts, done. (That’s assuming you don’t want to dig deeper.) It’s much
harder to report on something like the money chase that politicians must
endure if they want to take office, even though that’s arguably a more
important story for the public at large.
Which brings us to the slow-moving beast we call the modern political
convention.
“What these conventions are, more than anything else, are trade shows,”
writes Matt Stoler at the blog Naked Capitalsm. “Specifically, they are
trade shows for the political class.” He’s far from alone.
“A waste,” barks media critic Jeff Jarvis over at Buzz Machine:
“Note that even while newspapers and news organizations have shrunken
drastically, we are sending the same number of journalists to the
conventions that we sent in 2008 and 2004. Why? Editorial ego: It’s fun
to be there, in the pack. It’s fun for a paper or station to say, ‘We
have our man/woman in Tampa/Charlotte.’ Well goody for you.”
There are an estimated 15,000 reporters covering the conventions this
year; almost as large a crush as the omnipresent security forces in
Tampa and Charlotte. The majority of those journalists are working in
the security zone, behind the black riot gates that keep all but the
lucky few with credentials out.
But just how many stories can there be at a convention? How much money
is being spent to report essentially the same news? How many politicians
and delegates can reporters talk to before realizing that there’s not
that much there there? Perhaps not that many, and yet editors continue
to send armies to conventions cycle after cycle.
The Broadway choreography of modern conventions has chafed generations
of reporters…or at least it should have. Many complain but few actually
do anything about it, as in 1996 when ABC anchor Ted Koppel huffed at
the GOP convention “Nothing surprising has happened; nothing surprising
is anticipated,” before packing up and leaving mid-week. Oh, for the
days.
Big media these days are more likely to buy politicians massages and
drinks than they are to leave in a snit. “At a time of broad economic
distress and retrenchment in many parts of the media,” writes Washington
Post media reporter Paul Fahri, “some news organizations have spent
considerable sums on parties, freebies and showy extras during the
gatherings.”
Journalists have not only become part of the story, some appear to have
grown comfortable in that role. “When I think of things that should be
in a political convention swag bag, I think colorful t-shirts, buttons,
and unnecessary bridge-building projects for my district,” snorts
Gawker‘s Hamilton Nolan. “The Republicans disappointed. The Democrats
are even worse.” Yes, I get that Nolan writes snark. Still, it feels a
little dispiriting.
Speaking with GQ‘s Reid Cherlin, former White House press secretary Dana
Perino wonders whether the old-fashioned convention has outlived its
purpose entirely. “America has moved beyond this,” she tells Cherlin.
“The DNC and the RNC, it feels like 1990s. It looks the same; it feels
the same. The hall is the same,” says Perino.
Things may be changing. This year both parties lopped a full day of
events off from their conventions and seem to have muddled through. If
three days works well, why not two, or one? And, as we’ve asked before,
why not connect party faithful through the Internet, rather than
gathering them together in crowded arenas far from home?
One of the sidebar stories to this year’s conventions seems to be both
political party’s embrace of social and digital media. Republicans and
Democrats report record levels of website traffic as they stream events,
connect supporters with each other, and otherwise sell their candidates
to the voting public. Social media firms large and small say the same
thing.
Where a decade ago reporting was largely the domain of established media
companies with deep pockets, now the convention halls are filled with
laptops, mobile phones and cameras small enough to put in a backpack –
something unheard of as recently as 1996. Writing in the National
Journal, John Aloysius Farrell quotes longtime Los Angeles Times writer
Doyle McManus as he describes the 2012 conventions as a mix of
traditional TV coverage and a “hyperactive and very intense cocktail of
new social media.”
Whether social and digital media will do a better job at explaining
American politics than the creaky old journalism giants like CBS News or
The New York Times isn’t clear. Both of those organizations (and many
others) have considerable resources and on any given day can produce
outstanding journalism. A tweet will always and only ever be 140
characters.
Conventions are changing. So are our media, and what we expect of the
reporters covering them. But in the end, says the New York Times‘ Mark
Leibovich, perhaps the best way to cover conventions is to just let them
be what their organizers want them to be, and present it all without any
filter at all for the public to do with as they will. In other words:
C-SPAN.
“I
think that C-SPAN is a national treasure,” Leibovich tells VOA,
referring to the cable network where unfiltered is the byword and
viewers – not loud TV personalities – are the ones who question
politicians:
“I wish there were more networks that provided full, unfiltered
coverage of whatever’s going on (even if just for an hour or so a day —
on top of their regular programming) Not a lot of bells and whistles. My
sense is that the C-SPAN model has been replicated in various forms that
have been rewarded: Charlie Rose, for instance, has sort of a C-SPAN
style, and also, in a weird sense, the conversational flow of Morning
Joe. In my view, the more C-SPAN-like the other networks get — no
shouting, organic non-partisanship (as opposed to kabuki partisanship) —
the better. Not a lot of special effects, the better. Unclear if the
market would sustain it, but I’d watch, and I think the process would be
rewarding.”
