The Rotten Media Convention Coverage

The coverage all of the media including KCET has done of the Democratic Convention can only get a failing grade as far as I'm concerned. There were complaints after Monday night's coverage because they say the camera panned away to bored white people when Michelle Obama was speaking and they implied only black people were into the speech. Others said some networks trashed and over analyzed her speech after she was through minimizing the "glow" we all felt about it. Well, last night's coverage was worse. In the first place the whole evening was less productive. I caught some of the early speakers on CNN. There was this one guy who'd gotten fired from an auto assembly line or something. His speech was so dead pan it could be used as the "bad" example in some Better Speech class commercial. But as a whole the media seems incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad. The first major speech of the evening was Governor John Warner of Virginia, who is running for the senate or something. His speech was "adequate". Not a real world beater. But then the media throws us all into a 45 minute or more "black hole" where there was no coverage at all at what was being said in the convention hall. I guess the governor of Massachusetts spoke, and the crowd seemed to be into that one a little. Then apparently the governor of Montana spoke. And according to the meager reports he gave "a real stem winder" and the crowd was Really into that speech with a lot of boos and cheers at the appropiate point. But we never got to hear that one either. NBC said they were going to commercial and would be "back for the duration". As I recall them came back and flapped their corporate gums a little more- - and then went into another commercial. At this point I switched back to KCET. They were already doing the film presentation on Hillary, which means the people on NBC were missing it. When Hillary began her speech it was a quarter to eleven on the east coast. Keep in mind the public had been in this media black hole where the public saw nothing- - since before ten o clock east time, and it would be logical to suppose that a lot of people were switching channels to another program. When Hillary did give her speech she spent the first ten or fifteen minutes thanking all the people she'd met in the campaign and regailing us with yet more of the interminable "hard luck stories" we've been drowning in with this convention. When she finally got going she said some good things. One was the line about the Twin Cities and how George Bush and John Mc Cain are like Twins. The other was the line "Did you do it for Me or did you do it for all the Issues we both care about?" But the speech was all too short ending about eight after the hour, as I recall and immediately like THAT the cameras cut away from the celebrations to more media Jaw flapping, which no doubt went on longer than the entire speech took. Hillary should have played it smart. She should have done like Ronald Reagan did and given a really inspired speech where she didn't even mention the nominee's name. Never in any convention has the "Product Name" been more prominent. In a three word sentense there's a noun, a verb, and "Obama". All this stuff with the down and out people and their hard luck stories is fine for years like 2004 when you have nothing else to campaign on. But it's starting to remind me of Church. They drown you in all of these stories. It reminds me of Church in another way. Just as with there- - you hear perhaps out of the book of revelation talk of the pearly gates and people thrown down their golden crowns before the Lord Jesus and all acclaiming "Worthy and rightious of thy judgement". Worthy art the Lamb to open the seven seals" and the whole nine yards. But does anybody ask "Just exactly what is day to day life in Heaven going to be like?" No. Nobody asks that. This how it is with Obama. We know well WHO we are fighting for. Just WHAT are we fighting for is a little more vague. We hear the term "energy" but never any specifics. We haven't heard squat about what the democrats would have done different from Bush in the past eight years or the bills that came before congress or the way the democrats have handled themselves in congress these past two years. We haven't heard squat on anything involving United States' respect around the world, or what we will do about our many foreign problems. We haven't really heard any actual "plan" about anything. All we have heard is "We feel your pain". Tomorrow I'll be back with commentary about tonight's doings and we'll see what has developed.