I set out this week to provide a fair and balanced look at the coverage of the Democratic National Convention, as brought to us by CNN and Fox News.
Don’t worry, though. In keeping with the tenets of the Fox News Channel – the journalism beacon that it is – I’ll do the same when the Republican convention rolls around in August.
CNN Monday night was pretty ho-hum. Al Gore spoke, conservative and liberal analysts talked about it. Jimmy Carter spoke, conservative and liberal analysts talked about it.
You know how it goes. It’s what you expect when you tune in to watch a political convention during a presidential election year.
We know these events are staged. We know the speeches are rehearsed. We generally know what to expect.
Both parties get a fair shot. They each have their dog-and-pony show, and voters take that and do with it what they like.
So you can imagine my surprise when I popped in a tape of Fox News’ “coverage” from Monday night.
It wasn’t there.
I mean, they were there at the FleetCenter in Boston. They had cameras there. They had reporters there. They had signs there. They even had the all-important Democratic National Convention logo on the screen.
But the coverage wasn’t there.
Fox’s primetime bulldog Bill O’Reilly laid out the plan early on. As his show began, Gore was preparing to take the stage.
“We might listen in for a minute or so,” O’Reilly said. “But we’re trying to stay away from partisan speech in both conventions this year.”
Has the actual meaning of the word “partisan” been forgotten somewhere in this TV talking-head rhetoric?
By definition, a national political convention – Republican or Democrat – is partisan.
The claim that Fox News won’t show partisan speech at the convention makes about as much sense as ESPN saying it won’t show balls and strikes at a baseball game.
Instead, O’Reilly said, his show will “give you coverage of the controversy and the ‘inside stuff.’”
Indeed, the meaty “inside stuff” O’Reilly had to offer was prolonged discussion of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s “shove it” comment and an interview with Ralph Nader, instead of airing the speech Gore was giving at the same time.
Apparently, that’s inside stuff. That’s going to help me determine who to vote for in November.
It seems Fox News only reports what it thinks you need to know – even if the live event is happening right behind its commentators’ backs.
This means you’re at the will of their news editors.
It means that anyone watching only Fox News Monday night never heard the most repeated and scathing line from former President Carter’s speech, “In the world at large, we cannot lead if our leaders mislead.”
Instead, they heard more about Heinz Kerry’s remark, John Kerry’s less-than-perfect first pitch at Fenway Park, and saw pictures of Kerry in some plastic suit at Cape Canaveral.
O’Reilly said on his show Tuesday that the purpose of Fox News’ coverage is to analyze what’s happening at the convention, “not bring you wall-to-wall blather.”
So, one would think O’Reilly the analyst would at least know what’s going on at the convention.
As he wrapped up an interview with Ben Affleck Tuesday night, O’Reilly told viewers, “We’ll let you listen to Ted Kennedy for a little while, if he shows up.”
O’Reilly obviously hadn’t noticed that Kennedy had already been speaking on the stage behind him for seven minutes.
This is not a partisan argument. It’s a journalistic one.
Part of the driving force behind 24-hour news channels was that they could provide the wire-to-wire coverage and analysis of these types of events.
Fox News is now stuck.
If it sticks with this misguided form of coverage for the Republican convention, it’ll be doing viewers the same disservice. But if it changes and covers more speeches, it would seem unfair and unbalanced, and nobody wants that.
I’m just as cynical as the next guy when it comes to politics, but I still believe that despite the prewriting and the contrived pomp and circumstance, speeches are still the hallmark of the system. The speech is the only part of the process that connects us directly to the politician.
Fox News has decided that what matters most is what its own pundits have to say.
So, now I’ve reported. You decide.
Columnist Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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