Should media cover political conventions?

by Frank James

Slate's often provocative media critic Jack Shafer provokes again, questioning why 15,000 reporters are going to the political conventions which he says are news-free gatherings. Shafer comes to bury conventions, not to praise them.

With just one exception over the last three decades, the two major parties have known the identity of their likely presidential candidate weeks or even months before gaveling their national political conventions open. For that reason, one way to improve coverage of the four-day, quadrennial conventions of Republicans and Democrats would be for the TV networks to assign sportscasters like Bob Costas, Joe Morgan, and John Madden instead of political journalists to report on the gatherings. They know how to make a game with a foregone conclusion seem entertaining.

A still better way to improve convention coverage would be to withdraw all reporters and force the curious to rely on a C-SPAN feed: Unless a brokered convention threatens to break out, these political gatherings tend to produce very little real news. Yet the networks, the newspapers, the magazines, and the Web sites continue to insist on sending battalions of reporters to sift for itsy specks of information. According to Forbes, 15,000 pressies are expected to attend each of the conventions. Slate, I'm embarrassed to admit, is sending a team of eight to Denver and six to St. Paul. Attention! Don Graham! We're spending your cash like it's Zimbabwean bank notes!

One argument for covering the quadrennial party conventions is that they are the largest gatherings of politicians and activists that occur, thus making it one stop shopping for political reporters where a lot of useful connections can be made with party officials and others from around the nation.

Many reporters will tell you that political conventions are much like trade shows where journalists are exposed to the latest technologies used by political operatives or ideas floating around the political world.

Sure the events that appear on camera are staged and usually predictable. But journalists will tell you that there are plenty of other happenings that take place off the convention floor where useful information is gathered.

Of course, this year's convention is historic too on the Democratic side because an African-American is slated to get the nomination, beating the woman who would've likely otherwise become her party's first female nominee.

Because some of Sen. Hillary Clinton's supporters are threatening to put her name into nomination, that makes this year's Democratic convention more interesting than most.

And if you cover the Democratic convention, out of fairness, you really have to cover the Republican convention. Can't send 15,000 reporters to one without sending a similar contingent to the GOP show. Or vice versa. At least that's the way journalists tend to think.

There's another reason to cover conventions. Something huge could happen. Much of what we call news occurs when no one expects it to happen. It's much easier for news organizations to have their people already on the ground at the big event than trying to fly them in after it's taken place.

The results of the Super Bowl and World Series are less important than those of the political process. So if Shafer's logic is to be followed, maybe we shouldn't send journalists to those events either.