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The absence of either filter or rebuttal diminishes the informative value of conventions. Joel Send a noteboard - 01/09/2012 03:21:03 PM
This article below is not me speaking, yet I did the bold for emphasis

Conventions: A great learning opportunity for voters

Why the debate over a lack of news misses the point

By Brendan Nyhan

Every four years, the two presidential candidates do battle in a series of high-stakes televised events that could shape the outcome of the campaign. They also take part in some highly scripted programming where little real news is made and few viewers’ minds are changed.

Voters who take the word of elite political journalists would be forgiven for thinking that the first events are the presidential debates and the second are the party conventions, but as the political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien show, the truth is actually the opposite (see also James Stimson’s Tides of Consent, which reaches a similar conclusion). Party conventions help to remind partisans who have strayed from their core views what they really believe and also influence independents who don’t have strong links to either party, creating bounces in the polls that frequently persist through the end of the campaign. By contrast, the well-practiced exchanges that dominate presidential debates rarely provide the game-changing moments that the media loves to pretend are commonplace. Indeed, the debates occur too late to have much effect in all but the closest races.

Instead, however, the tedious quadrennial debate over the value of convention coverage has mistakenly centered, as it usually does, on their news value. It’s true in a narrow sense that little “news” is made at the conventions these days, but bean-counting juxtapositions of the costs of coverage and the likelihood of important news being made miss the point. News outlets don’t want the same convention story as every other media organization and are willing to pay more for their own in-house version, which leads them to devote more attention to the conventions to justify their investment in that coverage. In that sense, the costs of reporting from Tampa and Charlotte are a small price to pay for the civics lessons that the conventions provide.

So why are so many journalists deriding the conventions as hours-long infomercials even as my fellow political scientists defend their merits? The problem, in short, is that the conventions undermine journalistic “voice.” In every other aspect of the campaign, the candidates and their messages are filtered through journalists who are reticent to allow them to speak or be quoted at any length without interpretation or analysis. While scrutinizing policy proposals and fact-checking their claims can be valuable exercises, far more coverage displaces the candidates’ messages in favor of ill-informed horse race analysis and theater critic-style analysis of the “optics” of the campaign. Unlike the debates, which are moderated by journalists, the conventions allow the parties and the candidate to speak to voters unfiltered in prime time. That may be threatening to the professional status of journalists, but it’s good for America.

They ARE little more than week-long infomercials, hence largely unnoticed except by the partisan bases. Saying they trump debates because the latter only matter in close elections ignores several things:

1) Convention "bumps" usually cancel out each other,

2) Most national races in the modern era are fairly close and, most importantly,

3) Outside close races, conventions are at least as irrelevant as debates.

Sure, conventions allow the partys a week of prime time national media to frame the narrative in their own favorable terms, but how does that benefit anyone else? We can tell how much they influence the vote by how much time the second convention devotes to rebutting the first ones claims: Virtually none, except for those already dissected by those unwelcome journalists (expect the Dems to eviscerate Paul Ryans lies next week.)

Show me a convention that changed any election. Even the Dems disaster in '68 only highlighted the splintering of FDRs Big Tent that had already doomed Humphrey.
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how to make political convention speeches more entertaining - 31/08/2012 03:57:11 PM 541 Views
If they did that, I would actually watch. - 31/08/2012 04:18:06 PM 763 Views
Ditto - 31/08/2012 04:42:37 PM 429 Views
Ha, like Pop-Up Video! - 31/08/2012 05:04:41 PM 383 Views
That similarity occured to me, too. *NM* - 31/08/2012 09:37:22 PM 205 Views
and how fact checks the fact checkers? *NM* - 31/08/2012 05:19:45 PM 185 Views
Fox, presumably. - 31/08/2012 06:05:56 PM 619 Views
the fact checkers tend be journalist and deserve all the trust that goes with that *NM* - 01/09/2012 10:36:18 AM 208 Views
Facts are facts, and not in the eye of the beholder. - 01/09/2012 12:08:41 PM 384 Views
That might be true if fat checkers limited themsleves to facts and not opinion - 01/09/2012 02:44:41 PM 465 Views
Stating opinions as fact invites checking them as facts. - 01/09/2012 02:59:23 PM 584 Views
I will let Scott Wlaker explain it to you - 01/09/2012 05:56:00 PM 562 Views
Even Walker admits "It’s closed — has been as long as Obama has been president." - 01/09/2012 06:27:32 PM 523 Views
well since Ryan never claimed Obama caused the plant to close it doesn't matter when it closed - 01/09/2012 08:10:26 PM 392 Views
How could he save a plant already closed? - 01/09/2012 08:31:55 PM 372 Views
It's obvious. - 01/09/2012 10:12:33 PM 445 Views
Of course; how could I have been so blind. - 01/09/2012 10:41:03 PM 353 Views
That is a great idea that will never happen. - 31/08/2012 06:08:30 PM 532 Views
I loathe the conventions, but this will make it worse - 01/09/2012 03:52:15 AM 420 Views
you're talking about what people who already follow these things do - 01/09/2012 06:40:42 AM 368 Views
We fundamentally disagree - 01/09/2012 01:54:26 PM 545 Views
The absence of either filter or rebuttal diminishes the informative value of conventions. - 01/09/2012 03:21:03 PM 438 Views

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