Semantic Compositions

Prime-time, day 3

[7:03 p.m.] An off-camera announcer on the convention floor introduces "the conscience of the Democratic Party, Senator Zell Miller". Can't wait to hear if that one comes up after Michael Reagan's abortion reference turned out to be a nonstarter. Miller starts off by talking about how homeland security is an adequate reason to cross party lines, something that SC is surprised wasn't a focus of pre-speech commentary, instead of anchors giving each other undeserved compliments.

[7:05 p.m.] Miller has no ear for when to stop for applause lines.

[7:12 p.m.] Miller continues to talk straight through his applause lines, especially bizarre when you listen to the text itself, which appears designed to initiate a sort of call-and-response dialogue with the crowd. John Edwards did this sort of speech much more successfully.

[7:17 p.m.] Miller echoes a rhetorical trope of Barbara Boxer's from the confirmation hearings of John Ashcroft. Boxer said, "I've looked into this man's soul"; Miller just said, "I've knocked on the door of George Bush's soul, and found someone home". Someone must have focus-grouped that phrasing a long time ago and found that it tested well; it conveys connotations of particular intimacy.

[7:20 p.m.] Miller finished quickly, and they moved right on to Lynne Cheney. No time on any of the big three cable channels for commentary. NBC is running John McCain in an interview with Peter Jennings, but the other two broadcast networks are staying focused on the floor.

[7:22 p.m.] That was a quick introduction. Dick Cheney's about to speak.

[7:26 p.m.] Cheney tells a joke that's been in his stump routine for a while: "I understand Senator Edwards was picked for his good looks. How do you think I got the job?". Noooooo...make up a new joke for the convention!

[7:30 p.m.] Cheney's speech is held up a bit on account of a protester rushing the stage. In the meantime, this about says it for Bill O'Reilly. (Yes, I'm being unfair; there isn't an anchor out there who doesn't do the same thing.)

[7:56 p.m.] Dick Cheney just finished his speech. Almost entirely focused on defense and security. Will be interesting to see if the commentary focuses on what he said, or on the things he didn't talk about (although the pre-convention buzz has been that Bush's speech will focus more on domestic issues, so the commentariat might hold off 'til tomorrow).

[7:58 p.m.] Brit Hume has Bill Kristol, Mort Kondracke, Mara Liasson and Fred Barnes on (i.e., his usual cast of characters). Liasson raises the point that Zell Miller's speech was quite fiery, and that such speeches haven't played well on TV (she mentions Howard Dean in particular). Hume runs with this in questioning his panel.

[8:03 p.m.] Tom Brokaw comments that John McCain -- who wasn't shown during Zell Miller's speech -- was uncomfortable with said speech. With no comment for attribution or video record, is this McCain's view or Brokaw's? Tim Russert raises the flip-flop issue, which was a focus of Cheney's speech, and Brokaw addresses it pretty fairly. It'll be a subject of the campaign going forward, in his estimation. Chris Matthews is still emcee of the MSNBC broadcast, and promises to have Miller on. Matthews calls Miller's speech a very personal attack, but gives a Republican (Scarborough) the first opportunity to reply, which strikes your host as fair.

[8:08 p.m.] CNN has Aaron Brown running things again, and he's got Kerry spokesman Tad Devine on to rebut Cheney's speech. Having the opposition on to give a rebuttal is pretty much standard media practice: it happens after every State of the Union, and even after every weekly Presidential radio address (quick, readers: how many of you even knew that there still is such a weekly speech?). Devine is taking the route of attacking what Cheney didn't say, but he hasn't been given too much prompting by the media. Judy Woodruff is busy trying to get Devine onto the subject of the speech. Wolf Blitzer notes explicitly for the viewer's benefit that a similar rebuttal opportunity was given to the Republicans after John Edwards' speech. I would've just assumed this was the case (I missed CNN's coverage at that time), but Blitzer obviously is feeling sensitive to charges of bias.

[8:14 p.m.] Chris Matthews lied. It was 11 minutes, not 10. [This isn't really my notion of a lie, but I'm feeling skittish about being ironic.] He's got Zell Miller on now. Matthews asks if he really meant what he said about Kerry wanting to defend the country with spitballs. It's fair to ask about what he actually said as long as it's kept in context, and Matthews seems to be doing so. The audio hookup is terrible -- Miller keeps shouting "WHAT?" -- so I'm not sure this interview is going where it should. Miller and Matthews seem to be talking past each other. Miller just said "get out of my face!" and then "I wish we lived in the day when you could challenge a person to a duel!". Wow, he's feisty! It's effective, though -- Matthews is the original screamy TV host, but Miller's got him to be very slow-paced, deliberate, and absolutely quiet during answers. I'm not sure Miller went about it the best way he could, but Matthews explicitly acknowledged that he was probably misheard -- and in a fashion that made him sound insulting -- at the end of the interview, and invited him to come in-studio tomorrow instead. Should be fun if it actually happens.

It's 8:30 at this point, and your host hasn't had dinner yet. That was enormously good fun, but not much commentary to be heard after Matthews and Miller got wrapped up in personal animosity. Truth be told, though, it was more exciting than any policy discussion I've seen in years. Hopefully, we'll be able to watch for bias tomorrow, but your host's got a 7:15 p.m. commitment that will preclude covering the last hour.

More convention stuff

[6:03 p.m.] Larry King is interviewing John McCain. King: "You're a friend of John Kerry. You're endorsing Bush, but you won't attack Kerry?" McCain: "Uh, yes". McCain clearly wanted to tell King "Duh, moron", but he's too polite. Bob Dole, a guest in King's home studio, wisecracks that he and McCain have something in common: "we were both Bushwacked". Heh heh. Former Senate Majority Leaders Dole and George Mitchell trade comments about the Swift Boat ads, which are more interesting than anything King actually asked about. Could I make my disdain for Larry King, a spectator on his own interview show, any more obvious?

[6:09 p.m.] Jacque Reid from BET asks McCain about whether or not the RNC asked him to speak in order to appeal to swing voters. Two tougher questions from SC: 1) Did she apprentice under Larry King?, and 2) Wouldn't it be insane for both parties not to try to appeal to swing voters?

[6:12 p.m.] Hannity & Colmes on Fox News have DNC chair Terry McAuliffe on. Colmes asks McAuliffe "isn't it true that Kerry voted for the $87 billion in an alternate form?". Colmes is the liberal half of the show, and McAuliffe is getting an opportunity to go through his talking points, but that's not surprising or unfair. Asking the Democrats tough questions is Hannity's job, and the Republicans, Colmes' job.

[6:15 p.m.] All three channels cut to Michael Reagan's speech. Reagan, an adoptee, points out that he was adopted, not aborted, which makes abortion questions fair game during the next round of punditry. The speech quickly moves to being an elegy for President Reagan, which is what the buzz has been on this one leading up to tonight. Reagan jokes: "My dad used to quote Thomas Jefferson -- and remember they played together as children...". The speech is short, and wraps up with the playing of Taps over a video remembering the late President, mostly through clips of eulogies from the funeral. Something is dreadfully wrong with the sound system at the convention -- the music keeps dropping out like it's being played on a poorly spliced tape. Didn't anyone do a sound check? Otherwise, a largely personal (instead of political) and tasteful tribute.

[6:28 p.m.] Colmes now interviewing Jack Kemp. and accusing the Republicans of no longer being the party of Reagan. Kemp points out that Colmes was no fan of Reagan either. Your host confesses to not understanding questions of the form: "Why can't you be more like your predecessors?", addressed to either side; generally, they're posed by people who are being wildly hypocritical to suggest they actually miss said predecessors. MSNBC covers the Q&A on the convention floor about ordering the video; CNN goes to commercial.

[6:33 p.m.] Larry King's got Bill Frist on, and is asking the doctor about Dick Cheney's heart condition. Not unfair; Frist is a cardiac specialist. But how many times can you go to the well on this in one evening?

[6:35 p.m.] Chris Matthews has Ron Reagan on, talking about Nancy Reagan. Ron Jr. isn't exactly a reliable reporter of his father's views, for a variety of reasons, but MSNBC has been playing a dodgy game of moving him back and forth from being an interviewer to interviewee, just like they did at the previous convention. Matthews turns things over to Campbell Brown, interviewing former Reagan staffer Ken Duberstein, and she gives Duberstein largely free rein to memorialize Reagan. More questions about Cheney's health. Duberstein isn't exactly plugged in there; why don't the networks just talk Cheney's actual doctors into giving daily press briefings? Back to Matthews, who asks the crowd: "So, what do you all think of this guy [Ron Jr.]?" The crowd cheers.

[6:48 p.m.] Matthews finally has Doug Brinkley on to ask him questions about Zell Miller. Matthews ought to have made Brinkley mention up front that he wrote John Kerry's official campaign biography and is not merely the impartial "news analyst" that his byline at the bottom of the screen indicates. Brinkley praises Cheney for his loyalty to Bush, so he's not actually being the partisan his background might suggest. But this is the sort of casual sloppiness that makes it easier for conservatives to charge media outlets with assuming that a leftward bias actually is the neutral position.

[6:54 p.m.] Joe Meacham on MSNBC is drawing analogies between Dick Cheney and Colonel Jessep (sp?), Jack Nicholson's character in "A Few Good Men". Specifically, he quotes a scene where Nicholson's character argues that it's not for civilians to question the way he does his job. Matthews thinks Meacham is going too far, and calls him on it. SC recognizes that many readers will basically agree with that characterization (your host does not), but the salient point here is that such a view is essentially the Democratic talking point on Cheney, and Matthews -- himself a former Democrat staffer -- isn't letting it go unchallenged. At this moment, Matthews is reminding your host of Tim Russert, who he regards as the most scrupulously fair interviewer on TV.

Like the Democratic convention, it's hard to watch the coverage across the cable networks and find anything that really amounts to bias. If anything, the questions are generally lamely self-referential. The viewer could really care less about Joe Scarborough's modest talents as a rock vocalist, or whether a few dozen passers-by think Ron Reagan Jr. is a good anchor. Actually, by taking Keith Olbermann out of the coverage, MSNBC has managed to achieve a very admirable balance on the part of their anchors. SC is guessing that someone in the NBC boardrooms had this realization before he did. CNN and Fox suffer by comparison with their opinion hosts right now. Coming up is the big Zell Miller speech, though, so we'll wrap this hour's worth of commentary now.

A night at the Republican convention

Back to the conventions, at least for a night. All times Pacific Standard.

[5:08 p.m.] Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and someone SC doesn't recognize are interviewing Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff) on CNN. Judy Woodruff is asking Card about back-and-forth between the campaigns over what Kerry did when he got back from Vietnam. Card offers the standard talking points about free speech, but Judy Woodruff insists he take a stand specifically on the question of what he [Card] thinks of Kerry's behavior. Blitzer and Woodruff were reasonably good about not letting talking points be the only answers given last time around; this doesn't strike me as excessive.

[5:10 p.m.] MSNBC, CNN and Fox News are all doing fluffy things to cover the official nomination of Bush and Cheney; panning around the crowds, doing interviews with delegates on the floor, etc.

[5:13 p.m.] Bill O'Reilly just finished sucking up to Rudy Giuliani and telling him how great he is. Being an opinion journalist, O'Reilly's less vulnerable to criticism on this point than Shepard Smith would be, but O'Reilly doesn't seem to get why Larry King is boring. Watching interviewers turn into quivering groupies is not interesting.

[5:15 p.m.] CNN just did a brief backgrounder on the controversy within the Democratic Party about Zell Miller's presence at the Republican convention. Now they've got a report on the supposed controversy over whether or not Cheney should have been dumped for a younger running mate. So far as your host can tell, this has been a months-long meme of bored reporters. But hey, they seem to enjoy it.

[5:20 p.m.] Wolf Blitzer is interviewing the reporter who did the Cheney piece, John King, about Cheney's health. The man apparently owns -- and even rides -- a bike. This puts him one up on SC, who hasn't ridden his road bike in several years.

[5:22 p.m.] CNN's Carlos Watson is being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, just made an outrageously biased statement when questioned about the distribution of hurricane aid to Florida. Referring to the expected sending of FEMA relief in response to Frances, he says "some would call it largesse". Should aid be withheld from Floridians in order to avoid the appearance of vote buying? How cheap. This suddenly reminds SC that he hasn't seen Keith Olbermann on MSNBC yet.

[5:28 p.m.] Chris Matthews is on MSNBC now, with a panel consisting of J.C. Watts, Joe Scarborough, Andrea Mitchell, and someone else your host doesn't recognize. Matthews tosses Watts a softball praising Arnold Schwarzenegger. Matthews then tells a story about watching a little kid run up to touch Schwarzenegger's bus during a campaign stop in Modesto, and how this illustrates his star power. Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly has turned to sucking up to Bono, the U2 rocker. Unlike many celebrities, Bono recognizes humanity in his opponents. It's refreshing. But he's still a celebrity, and O'Reilly is still acting starstruck.

[5:34 p.m.] Wolf Blitzer, Aaron Brown and Bill Schneider are discussing the appropriateness of having George Bush meet with NYC firefighters. Brown seems to think it's not OK anywhere, even though the firefighers endorsed Bush; Schneider argues that it's OK so long as it doesn't happen at Ground Zero.

[5:39 p.m.] O'Reilly has Monica Crowley on to discuss a photo shoot she arranged for New York Magazine of Republicans; apparently, the magazine told her they wanted to cover the Republican convention, and then ran only the most unflattering pictures they could take. Looking at the pictures, it's not hard to think it was a setup, but this is small potatoes.

[5:42 p.m.] Humorously, CNN is running an interview with Georgette Mosbacher while she's on live on O'Reilly with Monica Crowley. In fairness, CNN isn't claiming their "delegate diary" is live, but canned stuff could be run anytime, and it's surprising to learn that they're not watching other channels for the purposes of sequencing these things.

[5:45 p.m.] At least the mysterious fourth member of Chris Matthews' panel finally has a name; Joe Meacham, an assistant editor at Newsweek. Joe Scarborough is telling war stories -- literally -- about the disagreement between Bushes Sr. and Jr. over going to Baghdad in 1991 (when Scarborough was in Congress).

[5:48 p.m.] O'Reilly is interviewing two reporters from the New York Sun about the protesters outside the convention. Showing footage of a policeman being beaten by a protester -- and a National Lawyers' Guild "observer" holding back a policeman trying to stop it -- O'Reilly is asking whether or not violence is a goal of the protest. It's a question with a complicated answer -- it certainly isn't true that all of the protesters want violence to occur, but it's not true that none of them want such a scene on TV -- but asking that question over such a video surely is an attempt to suggest an answer regardless of what the reporters actually have to say.

[5:53 p.m.] CNN's Carlos Watson is complaining about blogs taking away audience from the responsible TV media (hahaha), but I missed the bulk of it. Candy Crowley (no relation to Monica) is interviewing members of the Florida delegation about the hurricanes. They're a story to be sure, but not a convention-specific story.

[5:56 p.m.] Chris Matthews: "I'm trying to get this onto a more serious basis of judgment: who's got the cutest wife?" Obviously, I'm watching TV way too early.

Flipping over to CBS, Mark Hurlbert is holding a press conference announcing the dropping of charges against Kobe Bryant. It's hard not to suspect the cable news channels wouldn't rather be covering this story instead.

Back to the conventions

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.

Back to the convention

[7:30] SC, stuck working late again, tunes into John Edwards' speech on the radio while driving home.

[8:00] On the Alan Colmes radio show, Jack Kemp praises the speech as outstanding.

[8:10] SC gets home and starts flipping through the cable channels. MSNBC and Fox News are carrying a simply ludicrous count of the votes towards Kerry's nomination. The suspense is killing SC -- will Kerry get enough delegates? Stop me before I say "duh" again.

[8:20] The broadcast networks have better things to do with their time. On CBS, "60 Minutes". On NBC, "Extra". On ABC, Jeopardy -- in reruns. SC silently gives thanks for 24-hour cable news, and also for satellite TV because of how much he despises his last cable company.

[8:23] Fox is replaying part of Al Sharpton's speech. Carl Cameron says, "perhaps a little more partisanship than John Edwards and John Kerry would prefer". Not an especially partisan comment in light of the fact that Kerry's preference to minimize Bush-bashing was well-reported in the days just before the convention.

[8:25] Chris Matthews on MSNBC has the same panel on he's had for the last two days: Mitchell, Fineman, Brown and Scarborough. Andrea Mitchell is talking about a girl (Edwards' daughter?) who was hit by a hockey stick that fell in the Fleet Center sometime this afternoon. Little commentary about the speeches themselves. Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, says that Zell Miller's probably getting his talking points from the Republican National Committee. Howard Fineman expresses surprise that John Edwards talks about "destroying" terrorists, saying that he compares unfavorably to Dick Cheney on that score. Matthews' prompt? "Talk about Edwards' speech". SC sorely regrets missing Keith Olbermann, who is increasingly standing out as the only non-opinion journalist to really say anything all that partisan.

[8:30] Mrs. SC requests that your host detach himself from the TV.

So that's that for this evening's convention. I wonder if Kerry will have been nominated when I wake up tomorrow. Aside from that, though, it's fascinating to see how cautious the journalists often accused of being on any side in particular are being. Perhaps there's something to the arguments that the success of Fox News has forced the other channels to be less partisan to keep viewers. Or perhaps the accusations of partisanship are a matter of conflating each network's opinion crew with their news team. It is getting disappointing; SC longs for the 1800s, when papers were 10x more numerous, and 100x more recklessly opinionated. At least they weren't boring.

Someone needs to fire their fact checkers

Alas, the demands of a job 70 miles from home intruded on SC's ability to sit on a couch and stare at a TV for 3 hours. Such backwards priorities.

However, your host has been busy collecting articles from four major newspapers: the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Also two newswires, Reuters and the AP. Some slight amount of editorial judgment is going into the construction of a corpus; no effort has been made to save editorials, copies of speech transcripts (or excerpts thereof), web-only articles, or anything judged to be "content-free" (TV listings and such). That's not to say that some columns might not be less suitable for study than others. It's not at all clear that Howard Kurtz's media criticism column in the Post (for example, it's nothing against Kurtz) counts as theoretically objective journalism, so columns like that might end up being culled out.

But it's still early to talk about a study where the data is barely available for collecting as yet, never mind anything like a methodology firmly settled on. A few interesting tidbits stood out, nevertheless.

From the New York Times: "Mr. Gore's experience may have given him latitude denied to others: while Kerry advisers vetted all speeches for egregious Bush-bashing, they did not change a word of his."

From MSNBC: "That could already be affecting tonight's headliners: last night, Al Gore's speech was basically torn up, according to two sources, and is now being rewritten, presumably to fit more closely with the party line."

So what happened? Did Al Gore's speech get rewritten or not? It's not clear that this exemplifies any sort of bias -- would it be positive or negative spin to maintain that the speech was rewritten, and from whose perspective? -- but somebody has their facts wrong. Or maybe the anonymous sources behind both versions were just having fun with the media.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note early on is the disparity in the depth of coverage. The Wall Street Journal had only 10 articles even touching on the convention enough to pass the screening criteria, and some of them were "roundup"-type articles. The Washington Post had something like 30 articles on their website, but no more than half of them appeared in the actual newspaper, and some of those that did failed the criteria above; the rest were online chats or snippets from blogs. Your host pulled 15 articles from the L.A. Times, and 20 articles from the New York Times. It's not surprising to see that the Wall Street Journal's coverage is shallower than other national papers, given their primarily economic focus; otherwise, the coverage was fairly comparable.

The one thing your host did make sure to watch was a replay of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore's catfight interview. SC can't remember seeing any talk show host ever grant an interview with the explicit condition that the guest gets to ask questions back. That alone made it mildly interesting, but neither of them said anything you wouldn't guess from seeing them elsewhere.

Perhaps SC picked a good day not to telecommute after all. Dan Rather obviously would rather have taken the night off, a point he's making to anyone who asks. One of the stories of the conventions this year is the decision of the major networks to cut coverage to one hour a night at both events; in Rather's words "if we were on for three hours a night, in a lot of places a test pattern would get better ratings". That's not entirely fair to test patterns; your host owns 2 DVDs full of them, and watches them with disturbing regularity. In all seriousness, though, Rather may be onto something; if the media has decided that the conventions are basically a waste of good advertising time, does it really matter what they say about them?

Hill 'n' Bill

[6:45] Dan Rather is running a pre-taped interview with Hillary Clinton as part of general news coverage leading up to CBS' official campaign coverage. "Have you ever thought about being President? isn't exactly tough. Actually, the emerging theme on the first evening of the Democratic convention isn't media bias; it's just shameless sucking up to the players. Come on. George Mitchell and Bob Dole have been out of the spotlight for a while; I can't believe they wouldn't be willing to deal with a lot more just to get face time on TV. And the rest of these people are at least as eager to get an opportunity to get name recognition. This isn't a partisan observation, it's true about politicians across the board.

[7:00] I'm not going to take Glenn Close seriously. The official SC policy on political pronunciamentos by entertainers can be inferred from here.

[7:10] No comments on September 11 survivors, either, but not for the same reasons.

[7:30] Hillary Clinton is speaking. If I was recording this all, I'd sit down with a copy of Praat later and pull out some intonation contours; she prolongs primary stress in some odd places. Since Bill is coming on right afterwards, there won't be any commentary between the two.

[7:40] I can't be the only one who noticed that Bill said, "I'm pleased to share this podium with my senator", not "my wife". Interesting lexical choice.

[7:45] Bill Clinton is giving easily the most engaging speech of the night. It's not hard to see why; the crowd went wild for him in a way they didn't for Gore, Carter, or any of the other speakers so far. Bill Clinton manages to exhort and bang on the podium without sounding shrill or forced. That's not trivial. It'll be interesting to see if the post-speech commentary catches his most remarkable oratorical achievement; have a look at the transcript, at the point where he gets the delegates into a series of call-and-response chants in praise of Kerry: "Send me!". Oddly, I can't find the transcript on any of the network websites, or the official convention site, even thought Hillary's speech is available; is there an embargo on it? (Update: I don't know why it took 2+ hours to go up, but here's the transcript.

[8:00] Dan Rather is speaking over Patti LaBelle, but just promising more coverage. Over on Fox News, Fred Barnes is praising the brilliance of Clinton's speech in contrast to everything that came before this evening, and cracking wise about it being "the shortest speech I've ever heard him give". Mort Kondracke says that the Democrats have done quite well to take advantage of Bush's 2000 campaign line "a uniter, not a divider". NPR's Mara Liasson is similarly praising Clinton's speech; the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol is impressed by Clinton's comments emphasizing that the Democrats are a "party of strength". Right now, it's a little hard to detect the outrageous right-wing bias that supposedly characterizes Fox News.

[8:08] Tom Vilsack is getting grilled on MSNBC about the story circulating about his wife, who reportedly made some rather intolerant comments about the language skills of blacks and Southerners. Vilsack is brushing it off as "politics of personal destruction" rhetoric, and denying that the story is in context, but the reporter isn't letting up on him; does he think the story cost him the VP slot on the Democratic ticket? Outside of Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC crowd has been pretty much serious and fair-minded.

[8:13] I spoke too soon about MSNBC. Tom Brokaw and Jon Stewart are gushing about how wonderful Clinton's speech was. Now, your host agrees that it was effective, but this is a bit much from Brokaw, who's supposed to be "objective"; Stewart gets a pass as a comedian, I suppose, but he's not being very funny. Tim Russert reports that Al Gore had to cut a joke out of his speech, an old chestnut about a drunk looking under a streetlight for his keys. The punchline is "because that's where the light is". Ugh. Stewart seems to have noticed how lamely partisan he's been, and just tried to make up for it with something ridiculous about Jimmy Carter running around knocking houses down so he can make a show of putting them up. Why is the Daily Show so popular?

[8:17] Aaron Brown's floor reporter, Kelly Wallace, is either not up on the current polls, or has an axe to grind. She just said that the trend in opinion polling on Iraq shows that more people believe that it's going badly than before; the latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows a big trend in Bush's direction in that regard. Maybe CNN has different numbers. Oops, they don't.

[8:25] Back to Fox News. Carl Cameron, reporting from the floor for Greta Van Susteren, comments that "whether you're a partisan Republican or a Democrat, you can't deny that Clinton gave an electrifying speech. Major Garrett, another floor reporter, just made a point of replaying the "send me" line and commenting on its rhetorical brilliance.

[8:40] That's enough for now. More tomorrow, although my schedule may preclude live blogging of the commentary.

[Edited on 7/26/04 at 10:33 p.m. to add link)

Jimmy Carter's public panic

[6:15] Jimmy Carter's speech just wrapped up, and was focused largely on foreign policy (also on Kerry's military service). Chris Matthews asked his panel: "What was this speech?", a not terribly partisan question. Then he put on Tad Devine, one of Kerry's senior campaign managers, and hammered him on the question of whether or not Bush is creating "public panic" (Carter's phrase). Devine wouldn't answer until the third time the question was asked, and then still carefully avoided saying the word "yes", although his response certainly indicated agreement. Credit to Matthews for not letting up; despite his background, he's not lobbing softballs.

[6:20] CNN has put Larry King on this answer. John Kerry's daughters Vanessa and Alexandra are his guests. It's not even worth talking about bias when Larry King is on; the man is such a vapid interviewer as to defy belief. Among the questions: "Will this be a hard campaign?", "Are you close as a family?", and "Have you seen your dad's speech?". Must...change...channel...so sleepy...

[6:25] Half of Hannity and Colmes -- and I don't mean the Sean Hannity half -- is interviewing Rahm Emanuel, Congressman from Chicago. Unlike Matthews, Mitchell, Russert, etc., Colmes is an opinion journalist; his questions are things like "wouldn't you agree that the Republicans are on the defensive?", but it's no sign of media bias for a man paid to represent one side of a political debate to do so. SC catches the interview late, and doesn't hear much interesting, but Colmes mentions that Ann Coulter will be up as a guest to discuss why she's been dropped by USA Today as a campaign commentator. The column they'll be discussing can be found here, along with what Coulter claims are the comments she received from editors. If they're for real, the editors must be the only people in America not to get the jokes, whether or not they find them funny. Judging by their official comments, SC hopes the squabble was really about money or something else private -- did they really not know that Ann Coulter likes to be sarcastic? Hannity and Colmes are bringing on Jerry Springer next, and I'm not going to bother with that.

[6:40] Larry King has George Mitchell and Bob Dole, both former Senate majority leaders on, and is wasting a golden opportunity as usual, with questions like, "Tell me about the importance of family in campaigning". SC is beginning to regret committing to watching so much Larry King, but didn't think this through beforehand. Chris Matthews is still going on with his panel of Scarborough, Mitchell, Willie Brown and Howard Fineman. Not exciting. Actually, they're all just wasting time at this point. More after Bill and Hillary speak.

Muffins and Michael Moore

[5:20] Between the Gore and Carter speeches, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC discussed the Teresa Kerry "shove it" story; Fox News was busy covering the Lori Hacking story, and the major networks won't pick up until Bill Clinton's speech. Olbermann's choice of topics certainly doesn't reflect any particular bias, but he did refer to the Pittsburgh newspaper in question as "ultra-conservative", and mentioned that the reporter involved didn't deserve the treatment he received "even if he's from the Beijing Fascist Times". That's an odd choice of terms, considering that Beijing is controlled by Communists, not Fascists. Pat Buchanan and Bill Press ([it didn't work at CNN; why is MSNBC wasting their time with these two? -- ed.]) are on with Olbermann to comment. Or would be if Press' satellite connection worked.

[5:35] Over on CNN, Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and another reporter whose name SC didn't catch, are talking with Jennifer Granholm, governor of Michigan. Blitzer couldn't resist asking if Granholm, a Canadian by birth, would like to see an amendment allowing naturalized citizens to run for the presidency. Sucking up isn't exactly bias, but it was painful to watch. Fortunately, Governor Granholm was having none of it. Nothing all that terribly exciting, though.

[5:45] Bill O'Reilly is finally covering the convention, and has Ralph Nader on. Nader's not looking very amused; Gore just basically told the audience where Nader could go (without mentioning him by name). O'Reilly's pressing him on foreign policy, though, not convention-specific material. O'Reilly: "Last question, Ralph. Do you think Osama likes you? [emphasis in O'Reilly's intonation]". Considering that a frequent GOP talking point is the idea that bin Laden and associates would consider a Democratic win (or at least a Republican loss) to be a victory for themselves, a la Spain, the topic isn't unreasonable to broach, but that phrasing is, as O'Reilly says about something at the end of every show, ridiculous.

[5:50] Keith Olbermann, breaking from the convention to cover other news for a minute, announces that the exciting news of the day is that...Saddam likes muffins. I'm not making this up. He's trying to be funny, but his delivery is awful. Go back to ESPN, Keith, you were much better on SportsCenter.

[5:55] O'Reilly shows footage of himself having it out with Michael Moore in a Boston parking lot over Moore's refusal to come on the show. With cameras rolling, Moore and O'Reilly agree on a format and a length of time (about 8 minutes). SC will have to catch this tomorrow.

[6:00] Chris Matthews is asking Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough about the grist for the base coming out tonight. Consensus answer from them is that they have to get past tonight to start focusing on their actual agenda; tonight's just to get the already-committed riled up. Can't transcribe all of the dialogue quickly enough, but Matthews' questioning doesn't strike me as especially partisan. Jimmy Carter's about to speak, though, so that'll wrap the comments for now.