Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The First Day: How did it go over in the media?

The Quicken Loans Arena, where the action is taking place
Photo by Erik Drost, Creative Commons license

What did I see that I would have written about, as a journalist, on Day 1 of the convention?
  1. A shouting match broke out on the floor of the convention over whether to take a "roll call vote"-- in which each state must express its vote, rather than just the "the chairman says the Ayes have it" system they used, which was so confusing the first time, they had to have a do-over, but not until after the chair (Where is Paul Ryan, who is supposed to be chairing the convention?) actually left the stage without saying where he was going and left everyone shouting and arguing and not knowing what the heck was going to happen next. This vote, BTW, was about whether to adopt "The Rules" to govern the convention, which were pushed through at the committee level last week despite opposition, without listening to the opposition, in an effort to show "unity" in this deeply divided party. Yesterday's attempt to do the same thing on the floor of the convention backfired when the opposition got upset and clearly demonstrated that this party is not unified. In case there was any doubt, when half the party's leaders failed to even show up for the convention. These are facts, by the way, not opinion. It is what happened. 
  2. Melania Trump, who was supposed to be the headline speaker, appears to have plagiarized a few sentences from Michelle Obama's speech from 2008. I only say "appears" because it's not certain that she wrote the speech herself. They might find some junior speechwriter to blame, yet. But this should be a lesson to every student who considers plagiarizing an essay or news story -- don't do it. It takes almost no time for someone to find out. 
  3. Rudy Giuliani was on fire in his speech, which proved to be the highlight of the evening to anyone watching on TV, but perhaps not to people on the floor. I'm not sure. Things are different on TV than in person and, also, people watching it on TV probably aren't obsessed with Benghazi the way committed Republican Trump voters are, and that's who is in the convention center, for the most part. People who are not in that group are well aware that two House committees have investigated Benghazi and pretty much ruled out Hillary Clinton as the author of that misfortune. It's settled. Except for the people who were in the hall last night and those who agree with them -- and we're not sure how many of those there might be. 
  4. The guy from Duck Dynasty was surprisingly good. He got some of the best lines of the night. 
  5. The dominant theme for Day 1, and probably for the Trump campaign, is FEAR. Make everyone terrified so they will vote for a strongman. It's an old, time-honored tactic. Nixon used it. Hitler used it. Mussolini used it. The people in the hall might not be aware of that. They seemed to get riled up over it. And that is probably good for Trump. 
So that's my take on the first day of the RNC in CLE. What did the media do with it? A few thoughts on that: 
  1. First, it's probably the first time the Rules of the convention have ever even been covered by the media. And they were covered -- I saw and heard stories on the 6 p.m. news in very media outlet I managed to view or listen to, that covered this battle as the big news of the day. Believe me, in previous years the journalists didn't even GO to that part of the convention, except for C-SPAN, which is about gavel-to-gavel coverage. Or if the journalists did go, it was to do on-the-floor interviews with congressmen and congresswomen, senators, governors and political candidates that they could not get hold of at any other time. Which they were still doing, but those interviews got disrupted by the floor fight. 
  2. The PBS commentators I watched during the later part of the evening were saying this battle on the floor of the convention was "unprecedented." We know from what Dr. Colin Swearingen has taught us in this course that that isn't true. But you have to go back in history to find contested conventions like this. 
  3. You also have to go back in history to find partisan media of the sort we have today. In the 19th century, all media were aligned with one political party or another. That's the way it was done then. It was only in the 20th century that journalists "professionalized" and started trying to be "objective." They did that so as not to offend advertisers, or any of their readers, who were being delivered to the advertisers. That's how it was done then. Things are changing. 
  4. The best media analysis I have seen so far, of coverage up to yesterday, was done by Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. See it here: http://www.cc.com/full-episodes/8xvf5f/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-july-18--2016---the-road-to--the-road--season-21-ep-9988
  5. Vox posted another excellent analysis of Day 1 -- not the media coverage, but the day in politics -- that I highly recommend. It is here
  6. The other articles on media coverage that I highly recommend are two content analyses by Harvard's Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Thomas E. Patterson. The first paper is about the pre-primary coverage, which is surprisingly important in the overall scheme of things. It's here. The second one is an analysis of the media coverage of the primaries -- this year - which is amazingly fast for academic research! It's here.  
  7. The fact that the Melania Trump plagiarism issue appears to have superseded the Rules uproar as the main story of the day is indicative of the "Orchestra Pit Theory" I talked about in class. That is, as Roger Ailes (who's now apparently parting ways with Fox News after a lawsuit and other allegations of sexual harassment) puts it, 
“It goes like this: a presidential candidate can give the most important speech of his career on a topic that is the number one priority of the voters, but if he falls into the orchestra pit on his way off the stage, all the networks and newspapers will report the stumble and ignore the speech.” 

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