Conventional Nonsense

[Commentary] With just one exception over the last three decades, the two major parties have known the identity of their likely presidential candidate weeks or even months before gaveling their national political conventions open. For that reason, one way to improve coverage of the four-day, quadrennial conventions of Republicans and Democrats would be for the TV networks to assign sportscasters like Bob Costas, Joe Morgan, and John Madden instead of political journalists to report on the gatherings. They know how to make a game with a foregone conclusion seem entertaining. A still better way to improve convention coverage would be to withdraw all reporters and force the curious to rely on a C-SPAN feed: Unless a brokered convention threatens to break out, these political gatherings tend to produce very little real news. Yet the networks, the newspapers, the magazines, and the Web sites continue to insist on sending battalions of reporters to sift for itsy specks of information.