At the Democrats’ 1948 convention the big news occurred when the young mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey, delivered a stemwinder of a civil rights speech, and lots of Southern delegates walked out and went home. In 1996 in San Diego one day’s big news was that Ted Koppel went home. He had made the defensible news judgment that ““Nightline’’ would better serve its viewers by dealing with some other subject. But what of the general judgment of journalists that conventions like this year’s are crashing bores and slightly sinister?
When people complain that journalists consider the phrase ““good news’’ an oxymoron, journalists reply with the axiom that they do not report planes that land safely. Safe landings are routine and uninteresting. But what of the new notion that journalistic ethics are compromised by covering conventions that run smoothly? Such conventions are dismissed as ““infomercials,’’ ““scripted,’’ ““managed,’’ ““manipulative,’’ ““prepackaged,’’ ““sanitized,’’ ““robotic,’’ lacking ““spontaneity.’’ Even Elizabeth Dole’s talk from the floor was supposedly tainted by a smoothness that suggested a disreputable degree of forethought. (Never mind that one of Churchill’s contemporaries noted dryly that Churchill devoted years of his life to preparing impromptu remarks.) Conventions, it is said, no longer function as they once did. Well.
The Electoral College never really functioned as the Founders planned, but it still is important, and so are conventions. They are just not as fun as they used to be for journalists or as useful as they have been to television networks in their quests for audiences. True, there has not been a second ballot at a convention since Eisenhower put the Taft delegates out of their misery in 1952. But there has been drama.
In 1956 the Democratic nominee, Stevenson, allowed an open contest (won by Estes Kefauver over John F. Kennedy) for the vice presidential nomination. At the 1960 Democratic convention Lyndon Johnson was still fighting fiercely to crack Kennedy’s hold on delegates. The 1960 Republican convention featured Goldwater’s challenge to conservatives to ““take back the party.’’ In 1964 they did, producing a convention in which the factions were at daggers drawn. In 1968 Reagan came closer than many people remember to prying open Nixon’s grip on the delegates. The riotous 1968 Democratic convention was the journalists’ delight. The 1972 convention that nominated McGovern was high comedy in which Shirley MacLaine was, and Chicago’s mayor was not, deemed representative of ““the people.’’ In 1976 Reagan came within a whisker of forcing Ford to the uncertainty of a second ballot.
Today, when both parties are more ideologically homogeneous than ever, conventions can be orderly presentations to the public of each party’s chosen face. Such choices are newsworthy. A ““managed’’ and ““scripted’’ convention is news precisely because it is the meticulous expression of a party’s thinking. When journalists complain that covering such conventions compromises their ““independence,’’ the question is, what are they trying to be independent of? Reality? Journalists say such conventions are attempts at ““manipulation.’’ Actually, they are part of the process of persuasion that is the essence of the ethic of democracy. Inaugurations, too, are carefully choreographed to express and advance political purposes. Is it beneath the dignity of journalists to cover those elements of the nation’s civic liturgy?
By the working of our trickle-down culture, journalists have absorbed from the academy a watery post-modernism that makes a dogma of skepticism. Nothing is what it seems; everything must be ““unmasked.’’ Journalists, who consider themselves uniquely qualified to bring the ““real’’ world to the undiscerning multitude, think themselves duty-bound to pierce the veil of appearances. Television, which deals in pictures, is particularly unskeptical about this dogma of skepticism. (A famous joke: A friend looks admiringly at a proud mother’s baby. The mother says, ““Oh, that’s nothing – you should see his photograph!’’) Television journalists are dismayed by what they derisively call ““made-for-television conventions’’ because such conventions are all surfaces, with no hidden depths. But those carefully crafted surfaces are news because the parties’ minds are revealed in the craft- ing of them.
Most political journalists are political junkies and impervious to the thought that widespread indifference to politics, particularly in August, is a sign of the health of America, where the basic elements of happiness are not routinely at risk in elections. Yes, television audiences for conventions have declined. So have the stakes of politics – the Cold War is over and the federal government is out of ideas and money. Almost half the eligible voters will not vote this year, and most who will vote have already decided how they will vote. (By Labor Day the undecided people are disproportionately the uninterested.) It is not surprising that audiences for conventions are shrinking.
So is the importance of network coverage. Four years from today at least two thirds of all households – and an even higher percentage of households containing people interested in watching conventions – will be wired for cable. Let C-Span, CNN and public television (if that anachronism still exists) cover the conventions. No law of God or nature says that the networks need to go on playing the role they played before proliferation of viewers’ choices, back when the nation was the networks’ captive audience.
