MEDIA NOTES FROM THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION
August 2004

An Online NewsHour Report NewsHour media correspondent Terence Smith, reporting from the Republican National Convention in New York City, describes coverage of the event and media issues from the campaign trail.

Online NewsHour Special Reports: Media Watch Vote 2004: Republican National Convention Vote 2004: Covering the Campaign Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the media   Republican National Convention RNC-Madison Square Bloggers	August 30, 6:35 pm: Some random notes from inside and outside the Republican convention: Even before the Republican Convention got underway in New York, a couple of hundred editors, reporters and critics assembled in the stately, wood-paneled main dining room of the Harvard Club on West 44th Street to lament the wayward ways of the press. Specifically, they were upset about the way the coverage of the presidential campaign had been hijacked by the sponsors of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the private group of Vietnam veterans who have run television ads challenging Senator John Kerry's valor and veracity about his battlefield experiences. Of the 500,000 political ad airings so far in this campaign, only a little more than 700 have been bought and paid for by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But thanks to the "free media" they have received -- news organizations running the ads over and over -- the Swift Boat charges dominated campaign coverage for the last three weeks leading up to the convention. Polls suggest that the ads, which have been widely discredited, nonetheless have injured Senator Kerry's image with the public. Who was to blame? "The bloggers kept the issue alive," argued John Podhoretz, the Fox News commentator and columnist for he New York Post. "The bloggers, talk radio and cable news channels." "John Kerry's presentation to the Democratic Convention," argued Jill Abramson, the managing editor of The New York Times. "When he 'reported for duty' in his acceptance speech, he invited scrutiny of his record." Abramson added that her paper and a few others had taken the time to check the allegations against the available record and found most of them questionable at best. Joe Klein, columnist for Time magazine, argued that cable television was the culprit, airing the charges over and again on the "shout shows" with out any checking of the facts. "The more we talk about Swift Boats," insisted Klein, "the less we talk about George W. Bush's remarkable decision to go to war preemptively in Iraq. That's what we should be talking and writing about." In the end, (after spending most of their time doing exactly what they were lamenting -- talking about the Swift Boat controversy) the assembled writers and editors decided the bloggers were mostly to blame for perpetuating such a "non story." That prompted a young woman executive in the audience to murmur:"It's fascinating how the bloggers get the establishment media so riled up! It's almost as if the mainstream media is baffled that the bloggers have the cachet that they do. It shows how out of touch the mainstream media is these days and how much the Internet has changed the world in which the press operates."

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