Television-assisted reporting

For many in the working press, a seat in front of the tube beats the hell out of the convention hall

by Dan Kennedy

LOS ANGELES - The open secret of modern political conventions is that there's absolutely no need for more than 15,000 journalists to be here. Indeed, you can be reasonably sure that the secret will become even more open when news organizations begin making their plans for 2004.

It's not that there's no news. It's just that there's little enough that it could easily be handled by the cable news stations and the wire services. Flip through the pages of large regional papers such as the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, and you'll see pretty much the same front-page stories, the same analytical sidebars, and the same color pieces, executed with varying degrees of competence and enthusiasm. Even the New York Times and the Washington Post are breaking damn little news in this hermetically sealed environment.

An editor trying to figure out how best to allocate her political-news budget would do a far greater service for her readers if she devoted more resources to the primaries (when the most important decisions are made) and to the fall campaign (when voters are finally paying attention) than to these phony midsummer spectacles.

Trouble is, for many journalists a convention credential is not a matter of professional necessity but, rather, of prestige, signifying their God-given right to file important-sounding stories preceded by a Los Angeles or Philadelphia dateline, thus validating their own self-worth. (Example: this piece.) The smaller the news organization, the more crucial this becomes. And if you might think they could do just as good a job covering it by watching television, well, I'm here to tell you that that's exactly what many of them do.

On Monday, I trudged off to the convention site to watch the proceedings not live in the Staples Center but next door, in the Los Angeles Convention Center, where many of those 15,000-plus journalists have set up shop for the week. My intention was to watch it on TV. I knew I wouldn't be alone.

The Staples Center complex, by the way, is a much nicer place than the First Union Center, the military-like bunker on the outskirts of Philadelphia where the Republicans held their convention two weeks ago. Security is omnipresent, but the Democrats have somehow managed to do it without quite the same oppressiveness as the Republicans. The Staples Center itself fits the definition of glittering, and it features a huge courtyard with palm trees, dancing balloon figures, food stands, and a stage for musicians. And though the Democrats have worked as assiduously to keep the protesters away as the Republicans did two weeks ago, let the record show that one of the bands - a reggae group - dedicated a song to celebrity cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as its final number.

The media also have far more room to work than they did in Philadelphia - not to mention indoor plumbing, a significant shortcoming unless you're blessed with a cast-iron bladder. The extra space is especially important for those who work for small news organizations - like the Phoenix, for instance - that, lacking the resources to set up their own on-site newsrooms, must make use of the so-called media filing center. The center is a catch-all room for journalists who, like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman, have no place else to go. In Philly, the center was too small and had just one TV. In LA, it's huge, with TV sets all over the place and, against one wall, long banks of brand-new iMacs for Web surfing. It's almost as good as watching TV in your hotel room, the only drawback being that you're stuck with C-SPAN, and can't flip over to CNN, MSNBC, or Fox.

My intention was to interrogate some reporters in the media center about why they were watching TV when they could have done that just as well at home. My premise turned out to be more cynical than their answers. The first folks I approached were a twentysomething male-and-female reporting team from a pair of small papers in Illinois. They told me they were just taking a break to compare notes before rushing back into the Staples Center for some more interviews with delegates from their circulation area. It was, naturally, the first convention for either of them, and their enthusiasm was palpable.

Just as enthusiastic was Ann Marie Klotz, a 21-year-old student at Grand Valley State University, in Allendale, Michigan, who's here covering the convention for her school paper and for the Grand Rapids Press. Klotz, though, got at an essential truth of convention coverage - that is, that there are few shittier places to watch the convention than inside the hall itself. "It's probably better for me to watch it out here than in the Staples Center, because I was in there earlier and it's just crazy," she told me. "I didn't want to miss anything."

Another member of the TV brigade was Friedemann Diederichs, a German journalist covering the convention for a group of 12 regional papers back home. "I decided to watch the speech here. It's a little easier to take notes," he said. I asked him what he made of the content-free conventions our two major parties manage to produce every four years. "It's a typical American ritual, with the emphasis on the show element," he replied. "Show is a big part of it, I think. To be honest, in Germany these kinds of conventions are so boring, and they're over in one or two days." Not that the real purpose of the American conventions has escaped Diederichs's attention: he noted that if they were shortened, the parties wouldn't be able to schedule as many fundraisers during the week. "I have the impression that that is one of the main purposes," he said drily.

After a while I drifted over to the nearby Democracy Live! 2000 theater. A few hours earlier, the theater had been the scene of a panel discussion on politics for the hip-hop generation. Now, there were just a few onlookers, comfortable seats, and three huge screens on which to watch the convention. There was Hillary Clinton, bigger than life. There was Bill Clinton, bigger than bigger than life.

There was something irresistibly postmodern about it. Less than a quarter of a mile away, the Clintons were actually delivering their speeches, live and in the flesh. And here I was, 3000 miles from home, watching them on TV, something I could have done anywhere. But I've seen convention speeches in the flesh - most notably Bob Dole's in San Diego four years ago - and I can attest that TV is better. Even, in a way, more real.

Because if something doesn't happen in front of the cameras, can it be truly said to have happened at all?

To Return to Donkey Derby