Why I Won’t Be Politically High In The Mile High City

[davidnc76]

A News Dissector Decides Not To Dissect at the Dems’ Meet-up in Denver

The first convention I remember was way back in l952. I was at a summer colony, and I watched it on a black and white TV in the company of fellow day camper, Jeff Greenfield. It was the year of “I LIKE IKE,” and I was not really clued in then about U.S. massacres in the war in Korea or the dangerous rise of Joe McCarthy.

I was mesmerized by that live event, in the same way that those watching their first Olympics are glued to the contests and hyped about the medal count. (If you had thought that NBC would report on the human rights situation or examine the commercial interests behind the games, you have to think again. NBC is one of those commercial interests.)

Back then, conventions were not just a show, they were shown gavel to gavel. There was a media commitment to let the people see a real, not staged, political process unfold.

That was back in the last century when TV was new and I was new to TV. Jeff was already offering living room commentaries on what he was watching. Who knew he would perfect that talent into a career with CBS and CNN? The two of us tuned in again in 1956, when the cast of characters was the same and Adlai Stevenson then, like Barack Obama today, was a senator from Illinois and an electrifying speaker. Does this syntax and substance sound familiar?



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