Squandering Our Attention

"What is the role of the press, particularly cable news, in this election? And at what point do we tip to a kind of minute picking apart and tea-leaf reading?"

-- Carl Bernstiein, CNN, Aug. 27, 2008

Jamison Foser gets it exactly right about convention coverage:

The media's obsessive focus on what the Democrats should be doing and how they should be doing it is, of course, a spectacular waste of time. But it's worse than that: It squanders the attention of the American people, during one of the weeks when they pay the most attention to the presidential campaign.
* * *
[R]eaders and viewers were treated to an endless parade of journalists substituting cocktail-party chatter for useful coverage.
* * *
Next week provides the media a second chance to give voters the substantive coverage they need. Let's hope they take it.

Don't hold your breath. Tee-Vee hair-dos can no more resist cocktail chatter political coverage than Tee-Vee golf producers can resist airing all of those sappy, purple-prose threnodies to the game's ancient champions before, during, and at the end of every televised tournament.