Jennifer Rubin, a blogger for Commentary Magazine, has this to say about covering the conventions live:
Covering the Convention live gives you a gift: the gift of your own impressions and the counsel of your own judgment. You don’t hear or even see the MSM commentators. It is a blessing and a reminder that most viewers at home don’t necessarily stick around for hours of cable news chatter.
All that said, we can only speculate what viewers outside the Convention thought and how they reacted. What I can say is that in this hall the audience was enthralled and delighted.
Even as we bitch and moan about the 15,000, Rubin’s simple point—that minus all commentary, one can form one’s own opinions—resonates (even if “enthralled and delighted” is a bit general as far as descriptive analysis goes). For a blogger, of course, this is both paramount and paradoxical—forming an opinion quickly (perhaps more quickly than the effusive cable networks themselves) is cardinal, but so is accessing and re-digesting the opinions of others.
So given Rubin’s point that when live, “You don’t hear or even see the MSM commentators,” is it just a bit amusing then that her co-bloggers at Commentary have been bringing up CNN, CNN again, Fox News, Perez Hilton, Tom Brokaw, and Rachel Maddow, all night? (Because, I mean, that’s totally our job.)
Jane Kim is a writer in New York.