Our convention-al media

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.

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MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.

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MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.

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THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.