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Why CNN Struggles to Cover The Economic Panic

The current economic collapse is a difficult story for TV. It's a peculiar period in between an election and an inauguration. This most important story, this great-or-not-so great depression, is also the hardest for CNN to tell. I have more than enough reasons why in this late-night rant. 1) It's not a hurricane so Anderson Cooper of CNN is unable to position himself in the middle of the storm for optimal drama. In other words, TV anchors can't get wet and windblown, while viewers worry about their safety. The state of the economy is a disaster but not a natural disaster. Nobody's leaving the studio for this one. There's no place to go. 2) It's like a war and we keep losing ground each day. In the place of casualties, we have falling stock indices but it's hard to show the real damage. There's only so much you can do with oversized charts to tell a story. The war on terrorism featured a real enemy. We've just never been able to find them, no matter who goes after them. (Maybe it's not so different.) Campbell Brown ("No Bull, No Bias") should say that what the capitalism's finest did to themselves and to us was worse than any terrorist could have imagined. 3) Few CEOs, fewer economists, and almost no one in the financial industry, want to step forward and say with conviction what will happen. A year ago we couldn't get them to stop telling us what great things to expect in the next quarter. Not now. They don't know what's coming and they aren't willing to say even that much. They are MIA. Insider information is at an all-time low. Memo to all American CEOs: don't presume in ten years' time to write business books about your leadership skills; maybe there's a gripping survival story to be told about how you held on to your job. We want them to face the music. Even the Watergate hearings, which had a large cast of characters, were compelling to watch day after day. 4) There is not a President at the center. Bush is just not there. Like us, he's watching TV to find out what to think. Reporting from the White House doesn't have any relevance today. Moreover, the satisfaction in blaming Bush for everything is diminishing. In addition, with the election over, reporters can't simply ask the candidates to react to the day's bad news. It seldom produced much insight anyway but it filled time. Now Obama is filling time, and he keeps repeating that "there's only one President" but there's really not a President. There's a leadership vacuum waiting to be filled by Obama. (BTW, this story is much bigger and more important than Obama's election and I think he understands that.) Bottom line is we're waiting for a central figure to emerge. 5) Real experts are hard to find, especially ones with big hair. So over-present talking heads such as Suze Orman ramble on and on in front of Larry King and others. Here's an incredible ramble from Suze Orman on CNN: People feel they need medication because they are panicking. It?s as if the economy right now is in the I.C.U. unit of a hospital. We are in intensive care and they are throwing everything type of medication at us to cure what is going on. They are panicking because why? Nothing is working. They tried this, it didn?t work. They tried that medication, it didn?t work. They are running out of prescriptions to give it. We are going to be in the I.C.U. unit for a while. Eventually, I don?t know when that will be, six months, a year, year and a half, we will get out, we?ll be in the hospital then. We?ll stay in the hospital for about a year or two. After another year or two we will end up in rehab and then we?ll be okay. This is a long stretch. People have to stop panicking. CNN link Makes me think of Amy Winehouse singing "They try to make me go to rehab, I say no, no, no." Rehab is taking place over on CNBC. 6) Where are the winning and losing teams? We have learned more about Al Queda cells and Saddam Hussein's Elite Guards than about the people in power behind CITI, Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers, AIG, etc. We know more about the New York Jets than we do about CITI Bank. Are the slow-moving Detroit Manufacturers competing head-to-head against the fast-talking Wall Street Financiers? Please tell us more about these teams as we're entrusting them with such large amounts of public money. Maybe we need to start thinking that, as with football, we care because we're betting on teams to win. We have our money at stake. 7) I can almost hear producers wondering each night if there isn't a better story to lead with. "Isn't there a story we can do on Sarah Palin? Like her or hate her, people can't get enough of her." At least that appears to be the thinking behind her getting the most air-time in the week following the election. Would you rather hear about Sarah Palin pardoning a turkey or David Gergen saying no one knows what to make of the economic mess? At least, the Palin piece will have something interesting going on in the foreground and the background. 8) "Why can't this be happening to Russia or China? If it was only happening there, and not here, we would know how to cover it." CNN would send Christiane Amanpour there. "Live from...". We don't have visuals like people knocking down walls, rushing into the streets or standing in lines. The Fall of the Berlin Wall is the Fall of Communism, the fall of Saddam's statue -- now these are stories of new freedoms. In America today, we have a big fall without a distinctive symbol, without a video loop, without an exotic locale. Also, how do you explain that China is providing the bail for the bailout? As David Gergen said tonight on CNN, "China's become our banker." Even harder to tell that kind of "freedom" story. 9) The problems aren't going away and there's no timeline. So, where's the equivalent of "America Held Hostage: Day XN"? Nightline evolved from a special report to become a nightly hard-news program to follow the ongoing story of Iran holding American hostages during the Carter Administration. Why isn't this economic story played front-and-center in the same way? Isn't there a TV journalist saying "Holy Christ, this is the biggest story of my career and I'm going to bring it to you every night"? Ted Koppel, Edward R. Murrow, where are you? Here's my list of names for a new Nightline-like special series on the economy: America's Panic Attack The Joke's on US Invisible Hand-Wringing Capitalism on the Ledge The Economy on the Couch Future Shock & Awe Hitting the Wall And Falling on the Street. America Sucks Right Now US: Out of Order 10) Lastly, the TV media is no better off than we are at understanding this complex crisis. On a gut level, viewers know what the story is, that it's about them, their future and their children's future. They have specific questions that are difficult to answer (see the Suze Orman blog on CNN where it is promised that she'll answer these many, many questions; she doesn't, of course.) and they have general worries (should I panic?) that are hard to resolve. While we try to absorb as much information as possible, we keep having the same conversation over and over: Q. What's going on? A. I don't know. It's hard to tell....

Media Matters: When did experience become a flaw?

Midway through Bill Clinton's first year as president, Time magazine reported that among the new president's problems was "a staff that has almost no White House or executive experience," pointing to then-political director Rahm Emanuel as a prime example. Fast-forward 15 years: President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Emanuel to serve as his chief of staff. With years of high-level White House work under his belt, not to mention the connections and clout that come from having been one of the most powerful members of Congress, it would be quite a stretch to say that Emanuel lacks the experience to effectively serve Obama. So this time, some in the media have a different complaint. As CNN's Anderson Cooper put it, Emanuel is "probably the ultimate Washington insider. ... [T]he critics will say, well, look, if Obama is talking about change, why is he having a Washington insider?" So: Emanuel was insufficiently experienced to serve as political director in 1993 -- and now we're to believe that he's too experienced in Washington to serve as chief of staff? What gives? Was there a brief window in 2003 in which Emanuel's level of experience was just right? Or is there something strange about the media's assessment of President-elect Obama's staffing decisions? That Time assessment of Emanuel in 1993 was not unique. For 16 years, there has been near-universal agreement that the Clinton administration's early struggles (real and perceived) were in large part due to a lack of White House and Washington experience on the part of Clinton's staff. Clinton hadn't even taken office before USA Today reported in December 1992 that the "limited Washington experience" of the incoming White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, "raises the specter of Jimmy Carter's inexperienced inner circle." Six months later, Newsweek noted that McLarty's "lack of familiarity with Washington ways is now considered a political liability." The influential journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover later wrote that the choice of McLarty had been "a major surprise and the brunt of considerable criticism, on grounds that McLarty, like Clinton himself, was inexperienced in the Washington meat grinder." By mid-1994, when a staff restructuring resulted in Leon Panetta's appointment as chief of staff, an Albany Times-Union editorial was typical of media reaction: [Clinton's] sudden shuffle of White House staff is the latest evidence that he has finally grasped a central fact of Washington political life: It's not the place for the inexperienced, no matter how well-intentioned they may be. [...] He's also learned that the chief of staff position is no place for a neophyte. It takes someone with Mr. Panetta's credentials as an insider to fill this pivotal post. That's all the more true at a time when the White House is trying to push through key health care and welfare legislation. During a January 2001 look back at the Clinton presidency, Nightline host Ted Koppel summed up years of conventional wisdom: "The new president had put together a staff with virtually no experience in governing from the White House" -- something Nightline made clear was a mistake. When President George W. Bush chose Andy Card, who had served in senior White House roles in two previous administrations, as his chief of staff, the selection -- along with decisions to put other longtime Washington insiders in key positions -- was received favorably by the news media. Three days into Bush's presidency, CNN's Bill Schneider told viewers that "Bush is now surrounded by a lot of insider Washington deal makers, who have a lot of experience; like Dick Cheney and Andrew Card, his chief of staff; Paul O'Neill at treasury, and Donald Rumsfeld at defense. I think, a hard line and a smiling face and a willingness to make deals -- that could be a formula for success." A month later, The Washington Post ran a 2,000-word profile of Card that emphasized the benefit of Card's experience and portrayed him as bringing efficiency and order to the White House. So, the history is clear: President Clinton was lambasted by the news media for not having enough old Washington hands on his staff; President Bush was praised for choosing veterans of previous Republican administrations. Which brings us back to the present, and to the bizarre spectacle of journalists and pundits blasting Barack Obama for choosing staff members and Cabinet secretaries who are experienced and qualified. Here, for example, is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, noting that Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Podesta, and Rahm Emanuel either have or are reported to have roles in Obama's transition or administration: This is what you do when you don't have elections. You simply promote the people ... who had the deputy jobs. You can do this in any bureaucratic state. You could do it in the old Soviet Union, do it anywhere you have a bureaucracy. You don't need to hold elections to promote deputies to the top job when it comes time, right? You don't need elections for this crap, do you? ... You just keep promoting people from within in any old, tired bureaucracy. That's what you do. This is nothing short of insane. Eric Holder, reportedly Barack Obama's choice for attorney general, did indeed have one of the "deputy jobs" at the Justice Department -- in the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration. It's a pretty safe bet that if we didn't have an election a few weeks ago -- if the Bush administration were continuing indefinitely -- Eric Holder would not be the next attorney general. It's an even safer bet that Rahm Emanuel would not be chief of staff. Much of the nation may wish the Bush administration never happened, but it did. None of the people Matthews mentioned are being "promoted from within" -- not a single one. (Matthews, by the way, was unconcerned about hiring officials from former administrations when George W. Bush was doing the hiring: In 2001, he praised Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell as "real heavyweights in terms of experience.") Matthews' MSNBC colleague Pat Buchanan is very much on the same page, repeatedly complaining that the incoming Obama administration will be filled with "retreads." Yes: Pat Buchanan, born and raised in Washington, D.C.; educated at Georgetown; a veteran of two GOP White Houses and himself twice a candidate for the presidency; a 20-year fixture on cable news -- that Pat Buchanan is complaining about too many "retreads." That was a common theme on MSNBC, where longtime Washington insiders Chris Matthews, David Gregory, and Christopher Hitchens -- among others -- suggested that the choice of former Clinton administration officials was contrary to the idea of "change": Chris Matthews: "The possibility that Barack Obama might pick Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state has a lot of people asking, 'Whatever happened to change, the change we can believe in?' " David Gregory: "Is this change you can believe in? The Obama team is going to face these questions about big-time Clinton administration people into the fold now in some of the biggest jobs in the Cabinet. Eric Holder certainly fits that bill." Christopher Hitchens: "This is the woman who, if you were for change that you can believe in, whichever change it was, you were voting against. ... [I]t's Clinton redo, not just Rahm Emanuel. Whatever this is, it's not change." This has been a sentiment expressed commonly in the media, nowhere more frequently than on MSNBC, but the suggestion that bringing on former Clinton administration officials -- even Clinton herself -- is inconsistent with a desire for change is pure bunk. Asserting such inconsistency requires some deeply flawed assumptions: that everyone who worked in the Clinton administration is alike; that the Clinton and Bush administrations pursued identical policies with identical effectiveness; or that the desire for "change" is simply a desire for change in the types of people who hold government jobs. People want a change in policy and a change in effectiveness. They want a change from George W. Bush, of whom disapproval is near-universal. The idea that 67 million people voted for Barack Obama because they disliked the Clinton administration is ludicrous. It ignores the wide and deep disgust with the direction Bush has taken the nation and the stunning incompetence with which he has done so. And it overlooks the obvious fact that people voted for Barack Obama because they like him and they like his policy positions. But there is no evidence -- none -- that the nation as a whole has a deep desire to shun some of the people most qualified and experienced for administration jobs simply because they worked for Bill Clinton. Hard-core Republicans and Washington journalists may have such a desire, but that's about it. The whining from journalists about Clinton alumni in the Obama administration is even sillier when you consider that they would presumably criticize Obama if he chose people without prior White House experience, as they criticized Bill Clinton. So the only way Obama can escape criticism is if he hires a bunch of people who worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Perversely, after two straight elections in which the American people convincingly rejected failed Republican rule, the punditocracy would be less likely to criticize Obama for abandoning his promise of change if he retained the services of the very Bush administration officials who screwed up the country so badly in the first place. No piece of transition news has rankled the chattering class as much as the rumored selection of Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state -- not, in most cases, because they think her unqualified, but because they just don't like her. Christopher Hitchens, for one, lashed out at the news on MSNBC, leading the cable channel to treat his comments as though they were both surprising and important. They are neither. Hitchens hates the Clintons. Maybe not as much as he hates Mother Teresa, but there is little doubt that he hates them. Christopher Hitchens criticizing a Clinton is roughly as surprising as a Boston native speaking ill of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. Despite the fact that there is no indication that anyone outside of its own studios cares what Christopher Hitchens has to say about the Clintons, MSNBC has played his comments over and over again, and even invited him back on the next day to interview him about their previous interview of him. Host David Gregory explained MSNBC's obsession with Hitchens' comments by insisting -- all evidence to the contrary -- that "everybody is talking about" them. Hitchens' bizarre comments about Hillary Clinton included his claim that he has never heard that she is respected by military leadership -- a claim that, if true, merely confirms that Hitchens knows far too little about Clinton for his assessment of her to be taken seriously. And he claimed that in 1993, Hillary Clinton instructed her husband not to intervene in the Balkans because she was afraid that it would interfere with her health-care initiative -- but the book he cited to support his claim does not do so. As Media Matters' Eric Boehlert noted this week, the media has been essentially alone in their anguish about Clinton serving as secretary of state: The press represents nobody but the press on this topic. Meaning, the press has no political cover on this story because there's no partisan angle to the SoS story, which means their long-running Clinton hatred is just sort of out there, exposed for all to see. Think about. It's been virtually impossible to find any senior members of Congress--Republican or Democrat--who publicly oppose Clinton as the SoS, which in and of itself is rather astonishing. And within the liberal blogosphere, where one might expect there to be vocal opposition to Clinton since so many within the netroots opposed her during the primaries, most A-list writers have been extremely quiet in terms of airing opposition. [...] So, if you're keeping score at home, that means the Obama White House is in favor of Clinton, Republicans in Congress are in favor, Democrats in Congress are in favor, and liberal activists are, essentially, in favor. (And so are most Americans.) In the early stages of the last two administrations (both the result of "change" elections), the media made much of the importance of new presidents bringing on old hands with White House experience. Suddenly, they portray such moves as inconsistent with the idea of "change." There are really only two possible explanations for this inconsistency: They are blinded by their hatred of the Clintons, or are desperate for something -- anything -- to use as an excuse to criticize Obama. Either way (or both), they look like fools by coming down in favor of inexperience. America is a nation at war, with stock and housing markets that are falling faster than a flock of turkeys dropped out of an airplane, a broken health-care system, and countless other problems -- and the punditocracy thinks Barack Obama should refuse to hire anyone who worked in the most successful administration of the past several decades. Incredible. Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Black man dragged to death 200 miles from site of Byrd murder 10 years ago.

Brandon McClelland, 24, was dragged to death beneath a truck driven by two white men in Paris, Texas last month. McClelland was black. The site of his death is about 200 miles from the location where James Byrd was murdered in a similar manner ten years ago. (Image at left: Jacqueline McClelland, Brandon's mother; photo courtesy Jesse Muhammad.) McClelland's murder took place on September 16, 2008. Parts of his mangled body were found strewn along the highway at great distance. First responders treated the case as a hit and run. The county district attorney's office denied the possibility of racist motivations, and said comparisons to the Byrd lynching were "preposterous." The incident was reported in the local newspaper, which later followed with this editorial. Some bloggers and news sites associated with the Nation of Islam [ * ] have been discussing the killing as a hate crime for weeks, and claim local law enforcement ignored key forensic evidence at the crime scene. Howard Witt at the Chicago Tribune, who has covered related stories about racial injustice and hate crimes in this region, wrote about the case as a possible hate crime earlier this month. The story of McClelland's death -- and allegations the investigation by (white) local police investigators was botched -- seems to be gaining broader attention after having been picked up by AP today: Another Dragging Death In Texas (Associated Press). Snip from a related story about racism in Paris, Texas, also from Witt at the Chicago Tribune: The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place. There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged. One of the most widely-publicized lynchings of a black person in American history took place there 115 years ago. On February 1, 1893, former slave Henry Smith was tortured to death in front of a crowd of ten thousand (mostly or entirely white) people. Here is the New York Times article from that day, documenting the brutal details of his death in explicit detail. The child?s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. It was horrible?the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons?plenty of fresh ones being at hand?were rolled up and down Smith?s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat. Another snip from that century-old NYT story, which presumed Smith was guilty, and deserved the lynching: Whisky shops were closed, unruly mobs were dispersed, schools were dismissed by a proclamation from the mayor, and everything was done in a business-like manner. ANOTHER NEGRO BURNED; HENRY SMITH DIES AT THE STAKE. DRAWN THROUGH THE STREETS ON A CAR -- TORTURED FOR NEARLY AN HOUR WITH HOT IRONS AND THEN BURNED -- AWFUL VENGEANCE OF A PARIS (TEXAS) MOB (NYT) Update: BB commenter JWB nails it: This must be viewed in light of the Ashley Todd incident this week. Todd made up a false story that a black man attacked her and carved a "B" in her face, ostensibly because she supports John McCain. In Paris, Texas, a hundred years ago, a charge like that would get a black man burned alive. Today it doesn't go quite that far but you could see the shadow of the lynch mob forming in the darker corners of the right-wing blogosphere when the Todd story first circulated. The Southern Poverty Law Center has an interactive map of racist organizations and businesses (think: White Pride record stores, KKK branches) in this part of Texas, which you can view here. [ * ] Incidentally, SLPC also categorizes the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party as "hate groups." Previously on Boing Boing: The Last Lynching: Ted Koppel documentary on Discovery tonight...

The Last Lynching: Ted Koppel documentary on Discovery tonight

Discovery Channel premeres a documentary tonight with Ted Koppel about three Americans whose lives were profoundly affected by white supremacist terrorism. The most recent invident: a 1981 lynching in Mobile, Alabama in which a 19-year-old black man was killed by two members of the Ku Klux Klan. Here's the thing that really amazes me, looking at the details on this program tonight: Barack Obama, the first black presidential candidate nominated by a major American political party, is almost exactly the same age as that young man killed in that "last lynching." They were born some months apart. The point being: our nation's bad old days weren't all that long ago -- if we can even say they're past tense at all. Trailer above, and snip from the program description: This year, however, each [victim of racial violence profiled in this program] was directly involved in naming Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic Party?s nominee for president. "Barack Obama's nomination doesn't mean the end of racism any more than Sarah Palin's nomination signals the end of sexism or gender bias in America. But what giant steps forward! The Last Lynching offers a look at how far we've come on the racial front, and how recent some of the worst days of racial violence really were," explained Koppel. Koppel and his team of producers take viewers into the lives of these three: Congressman Robert Filner who, as an 18-year-old Freedom Rider, was thrown into Mississippi?s Parchman Prison; Florida schoolteacher Lizzie Jenkins who recalls tales of her grandfather watching the lynching of five African Americans in 1916; and Congressman Artur Davis who as a law student worked to hold the Ku Klux Klan accountable for "The Last Lynching," which took place in Mobile, Ala., in 1981. The program airs today, Monday, Oct. 13, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Program preview (Discovery). Here's the Wikipedia entry on that 1981 murder. Here's the NYT review of the Discovery documentary: In the Bad Old Days, Not So Very Long Ago. The NPR program Tell Me More has an audio piece up about the documentary here....

Boehlert: The Denver media migraine

I had to chuckle when I read about the newsroom-wide email New York Times executive editor Bill Keller sent out to his staff last week on the eve of his political team deploying to Denver, and then St. Paul, to cover the political conventions. In his electronic memo, Keller praised the newspaper's coverage of the just-completed Beijing Olympics ("dazzling"), and, like any good newsroom manager, challenged the rest of the newspaper to match that excellence. Specifically, he called on his political team to reach the same journalistic heights at the conventions that the Times' sports department had achieved in Beijing. I laughed not because I thought the Times' coverage of the Olympics didn't deserve a pat on the back. Indeed, the Times crew seemed to cover the Olympics with uniform skill and grace. Its pages were filled with often brilliant deadline writing, insightful analysis, gripping human interest stories, and eye-popping photography. (And the Times' Internet-based coverage was just as impressive.) My caustic chuckle sprang from the fact that Keller actually thought the Times' upcoming convention coverage was going to achieve some kind of greatness. That the Times team was going to gumshoe Denver like no other news team, drill down to the issues that were driving the campaign, break away from the news pack to uncover fresh angles, and set some kind of news standard for political reporting. The sad truth was that the coverage, not just from the Times but from virtually every traditional outlet I sampled, was a fiasco. And it made my head hurt. How 15,000 credentialed journalists could descend on Denver and produce such unvaryingly weak and shoddy coverage of a staged news event -- and do it with coverage that celebrated sameness and shallowness -- was a sad spectacle that newsrooms nationwide ought to ponder. What we saw beamed out of Beijing, both in print and video form, was often memorable journalism. What we saw seep out of Denver was a farce. Not content to simply cover what was, by every standard, an historic and fascinating political gathering, the press felt the need to embellish the storylines (when not completely inventing them), tell news consumers what to think and how to feel, and to hog the spotlight by turning themselves into the topic of news reports. The media hordes "got in the way of the story, because they made themselves the story," noted Brooke Gladstone at NPR. (Exhibit A.) Note that approximately 20,000 journalists covered the sprawling Beijing Olympics, and think about the wonderful journalism they produced for news consumers all around the world relaying headlines and capturing the emotions of that two-week epic event. By contrast, in Denver, 15,000 pros camped out and pretty much embarrassed their profession for nearly four days straight. First of all, why on earth would 15,000 journalists cover any convention? And why do major American outlets, as confirmed by Keller's email, view the staged political events to be as newsworthy as a global phenomenon such as the Olympics? Note that for this year's conventions, USA Today sent 34 journalists, compared to the 41 staffers the paper assigned to cover the Olympics. (The Washington Post sent 38 journalists to the convention, plus an undisclosed number from its website, for a total of more than 50.) I'm guessing the Times sent roughly the same number as USA Today to both the convention and to Beijing. Yet look how badly the Denver team underperformed as compared to the Times' Olympics reporting and commentary. Or did Times execs consider Maureen Dowd's Denver column to be an example of journalistic insight? That was the one where the first person she quoted to capture the "vibe" of the Democratic convention was a Republican consultant. (Naturally, the partisan pro claimed "submerged hate" permeated the event.) And what about Patrick Healy's August 28, page one article about Hillary's address to the convention where Healy reported, in the second paragraph, that she "took steps on Tuesday -- deliberate steps, aides said -- to keep the door open to a future bid for the presidency." As the Daily Howler noted, there wasn't a single fact or quote in the entire article to back up Healy's fictitious claim that bolstered the "ill will" theme of the article's opening. Was that the kind of Denver gold Keller was hoping for? Imagine if a Times reporter filed a front-page story from Beijing about Michael Phelps and inserted a completely unsupported claim up high in the article that made Phelps look petty and selfish. Think Times editors would have printed it? And what about Times heavy hitter Jill Abramson, who wrote matter-of-factly on Friday that the Monday-through-Wednesday portion of the convention had a theme, and "its narrative was [the Clinton] soap opera." And specifically, the "narrative" was whether Bill and Hillary would "behave themselves" and "embrace Barack Obama." She wrote that after the convention had concluded, after Bill and Hillary Clinton had enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama and after Democrats ended the convention on an historic and united front. Even then, the Times was still pushing the media's beloved narrative of a Clinton "soap opera" and how the two nearly ripped the party in two inside the Pepsi Center. Question for Abramson: Who pre-selected that "soap opera" narrative? Answer: The press. What actual proof did the press have to support it? Almost none. (Hillary Clinton had already publicly, and formally, endorsed Obama months prior to the convention.) I suspect if a truth serum poll could have been conducted in Denver to find out how many professional pol watchers within the press corps actually thought that Bill or Hillary Clinton would refuse to "embrace" Obama at the convention, the answer would have been zero. But how many within the press pretended for days that that was a possibility? Almost all of them. Indeed, there was lots of pretending going on in Denver, like when Politico suggested Hillary Clinton might be booed by Obama delegates during her address. And when, prior to Bill Clinton's taking the Denver stage, MSNBC's Chris Matthews raised the possibility that he might get a Bronx cheer. (Apparently because they're such divisive figures within the Democratic Party.) Viewers who saw the rapturous welcome both Clinton's received will recall that those predictions were inaccurate. The Newark Star-Ledger was just one of many news outlets that pretended about Hillary Clinton's speech, claiming it "was the most anxiously awaited moment of the convention." Really? Twelve million more viewers tuned in to Obama's speech than watched Clinton's address. Yet the press, confusing themselves for actual voters, told us all week that Americans were fixated on the runner-up. And all week long, that passed as insight. What was behind that type of half-baked Times/Politico/Matthews convention analysis? The answer is that it was based on nothing. The concocted Clinton storylines simply reflected what some journalists wanted to see happen, which then made it slightly plausible, and therefore news. (Speculating now trumps reporting.) To suggest that approach demolishes decades' worth of American journalism standards would be an understatement. It's impossible to escape the conclusion that journalists for much of the week in Denver weren't informing news consumers about the unfolding event, they were purposefully misinforming people. (Bill and Hill might snub Obama!) Think about where journalism is heading when an entire industry knowingly adopts a false narrative and pushes it for days simply because it likes it; because it gives journalists a good storyline. Fifteen thousand journalists in Denver and they couldn't even report what actually happened there. Instead, they invented a storyline of their liking. And (surprise!) it was one that demeaned Democrats. And that's where the real harm came, because Denver wasn't simply a case of too many journalists chasing too few stories and having to fill up too much air time (i.e., being boring). It was a case of too many journalists embracing manufactured stories in order to fill up airtime. Like the insipid, day-long media boomlet, propagated by the GOP, about whether or not the columns constructed for the stage Obama appeared on Thursday night at Invesco Field would somehow take away from his speech or distract viewers. Or the incessant media mentions about the long-debunked myth that Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey Sr. was denied a speaking role at the 1992 Democratic convention because he opposed abortion rights. And guess what? All the bogus convention storylines poked Democrats. Do you think the same press trend will continue in St. Paul this week? Will journalists attach themselves to flimsy narratives that make Republicans look weak and divided? I have my doubts. What's so curious about the effusive, often breathless, convention coverage we see today is that not that long ago there was growing media momentum to shun the events. Remember back in 1996 when ABC's Ted Koppel famously packed up his Nightline crew after two days at the GOP convention in San Diego and went home, complaining there was no news to report at the tightly scripted pageants? (Koppel still feels that way, making the inarguable point on NBC last week that the conventions could easily be covered by 1,000 journalists instead of 15,000.) There was a growing feeling that took root in the late 1990s that the overscripted conventions were a joke in terms of news, that they insulted the intelligence of serious journalists, and that something needed to be done to change them (i.e., shorten them) because it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify lavishing so much time and attention on the quadrennial confabs. Fast forward to 2008 and ask yourselves: Have the national conventions become any less scripted? No. If anything, the conventions have become more controlled. But boy, the media's attitude towards them has completely reversed. Rather than pulling the cameras back as Koppel suggested, the amount of TV time devoted to conventions (well, the amount of TV time devoted to talking about the conventions on-site) has absolutely exploded. Thanks to cable television's nearly around-the-clock coverage, there were easily 150 hours set aside last week for the Democratic convention. Television's eruption of convention interest mirrors the widespread enthusiasm throughout the press corps for the political events. No longer seen as insulting, artificial events that had to be covered for tradition's sake, the press now revels in the conventions -- celebrates them! -- and treats them as wildly important, entertaining, and newsworthy. To me, that 180-degree shift from "Conventions are fake!" to "Conventions are awesome!" captures the disappearing standards within political journalism and how a new breed of shallowness has been embraced and become a hallmark trait. Prior to Denver's opening gavel, Slate's Jack Shafer, bemoaning the obvious press excesses surrounding the non-news conventions, wrote, "If the political press corps were honest, they'd start every convention story with the finding that nothing important happened that day and that your attention is not needed." His take was dead-on. And that was before we knew what kind of leaky journalism was going to ooze out of Denver.