On Aug. 12 I was listening to the speeches and events of the opening day of the Republican National Convention. The first few hours were broadcast by PBS, CNN and C-SPAN.
PBS and CNN did a miserable job. The anchor people were more interested in chattering among themselves and interviewing people on the convention floor than in presenting the people on the speaker’s platform. At one point CNN had the gall to say some people on the floor were not listening to the speeches, all the while themselves paying no attention! They even observed that the speeches were not so much for the delegates as for the TV audience . . . but then prevented the TV audience from hearing them.
Had it not been for C-SPAN, which did an excellent job of letting the story carry itself, I would not have known what was going on and would certainly have missed some of the fine 5-minute speeches and activities and thus the flavor of the meeting.
When the other networks came on later, they were no better. ABC’s performance was an outright insult to former President Gerald Ford. After doing their own talking during the first part of his speech, they then shifted to advertising during most of the remainder of it.
I kept thinking: Why are they so arrogant as to believe that their feeble commentaries on events are more important than the events themselves? They owed it to the public to present the convention, not themselves.
