I was hoping to give some equal time to covering media bias at the Republican Convention, but the truth is that I haven't been able to spend much time in front of a TV to do so. A few impressions from flipping through the replays of Scarborough & Reagan (MSNBC), Wolf Blitzer and Larry King (CNN), and Bill O'Reilly and Hannity & Colmes (Fox News):
Scarborough and Reagan (Ron Jr., making it another right/left, Crossfire-type show) are concerned largely with issues like Joe Scarborough's embarrassing turn as a rock singer at the 2000 Republican convention (when Scarborough was a Congressman) and whether or not you can score real Cuban cigars in New York City during the convention. Your host is quite curious as to what Mike Barnicle is doing as a TV commentator; doesn't making up interviews get you kicked out of the pool of respectable journalists?
The CNN replays are from the boring, not-even-close-to-prime-time parts of the convention, where the floor reporters were out visiting the various state delegations. Larry King breathlessly announces: "We have Bob Dole! He's actually here folks!". Wow, Larry. I mostly found him too vapid to be worth commenting on last time around, and he doesn't seem to have improved. Then again, I thought Larry King was a softball interviewer years before now. Oh well.
O'Reilly has been on an ego trip ever since declaring that Al Gore would have won the 2000 election if he just had come on "The Factor". Hannity is an opinion journalist, and this time, it's his side. Would've been much more interesting to watch Brit Hume's panel, but I missed the convention during its first run today, and that means missing the coverage worth watching.
I'm still busy collecting news stories for this project, but I can tell that I'm not likely to get much time to watch TV, just like the last time around. If only I had three recording devices to catch all three of the big cable news channels (and maybe a few more to get the networks, too). I'll try to do at least one day's worth of detailed analysis like before, but I've learned my lesson about how hard it is to try to schedule 3-4 hours of watching TV for four days in a week.
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