Republican National Convention

By JEREMY GERARD

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Republican National Convention (Various networks and times) It has been more than a decade since ABC News' Jeff Gralnick called the quadrennial national political conventions "dinosaurs" on the path to extinction, at least insofar as the broadcast networks' coverage of them was concerned. Having done everything in their power to bleed every last bit of spontaneity and excitement out of the political love-ins, the Republican and Democratic handlers watched as ABC, CBS and NBC steadily cut back their coverage. Even CNN refuses to buy into the packaging, looking more and more like its broadcast counterparts in serving up large dollops of inhouse punditry while reducing the events on the convention floor to white noise.
 

The coverage on public television remains considerably lengthier, though no longer what one could call comprehensive. Now it's left to the invaluable C-SPAN to provide something approaching gavel-to-gavel coverage. It's important to remember, however, that cable reaches only two-thirds of the country. That leaves a lot of people dependent on the very networks struggling to put their own spin on events already so highly spun as to resemble cotton candy. The journalism is as predictable as the event being covered.

The irony, of course, is that all that micromanaging was in the service of packing the conventions for television, and now nobody wants them. Not the broadcast networks, which have allotted a mere hour of primetime each night for the 1996 conventions, and certainly not viewers, who, to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, have been staying away in droves, at least for the first two days of the Republican convention in San Diego.

An argument can be made that just because the conventions are ceremonial doesn't excuse the networks from the responsibility of covering them. As former CBS News president Ed Joyce told the New York Times when the networks began seriously cutting back on convention coverage in 1984, news divisions are "in the business of covering the ceremonies of our nation. That's part of our obligation of service."

The '84 conventions were the first for all three of the networks' new anchors: ABC's Peter Jennings, CBS' Dan Rather and NBC's Tom Brokaw. This time around, on opening night in San Diego, they were more determined than ever to show they weren't about to be pushed around by political hacks. So, for example, while the delegates were held rapt by a filmed salute to Ronald Reagan -- talk about ceremony -- Rather was chatting up keynoter Susan Molinari before the CBS cameras finally went live to Nancy Reagan.

Big Three network viewers also missed J.C. Watts, a young black representative from Oklahoma of surpassing eloquence ("I have a simple way of defining character," he said, preaching gospel to this crowd. "Doing what's right when nobody's looking"); you had to find him on PBS and C-SPAN. Ditto the smarmy, schoolmarmy Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who asked, "Don't you think it's time to elect a president who will keep Bill Clinton's promises?" and made good use of video in an attempt to embarrass the president.

Was it all a show of unity and diversity in a party that can boast very little of either? Sure. But we viewers are not dumb. Yes, the convention was cleansed of the platform battles that might actually have piqued audience interest, but there was still some value in the ceremony taking place.

I'll take C-SPAN's silent open eye over MSNBC's Brian Williams blathering about the "flavor of Susan Molinari" and the "flavor" of the floor -- yeccccch! as they used to say in Mad magazine -- any day.