Denver as last gasp of the old media

Bill Boyarsky, posting dispatches from the Democratic gathering at Truthdig.com, concluded that this convention marked a welcome end to big media dominance of political reporting. This from a media veteran who covered conventions for AP and the Los Angeles Times over decades. Sample:

I suppose I should be sad to watch the decline of the once mighty political media, an institution that trained and nurtured me.

But that’s not how I feel. For this was the institution that cheered when President Bush took us to war. These were the political reporters who were once transfixed with Barack Obama and are now ripping him to shreds. And these are the journalists who are still so awed by John McCain’s years as a prisoner of war that they won’t dig into his record.

This is also the institution that is getting this Democratic National Convention wrong, obsessed with a phony feud between Obama and Hillary Clinton, wasting time interviewing that small but vengeful cult, the die-hard Hillaryites.

That vision of the convention is not what’s happening.

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Luckily, for the good of the Republic, this bad reporting has had little impact on events, unlike the effect it would have had in the past. The mass media have been weakened greatly in the last few years, hurt by a loss of readers, viewers and advertisers and the growing power of the Internet. That came through clearly on the first day of the convention when I saw the Los Angeles Times sharing a workspace with the other Tribune papers. When I was covering conventions for the Times, we had our own big workspace and all kinds of big shots came calling.

Boyarsky also intends to cover the Republicans in St. Paul. When he blogs for LA Observed, his posts can be found here.

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