By Karen Dunlap
I watched Cate Edwards introduce her mother, Elizabeth Edwards, last night and wondered, "What do young people see when they watch the Democratic Convention?" The previous night Chris Heinz introduced his mother, Teresa Heinz Kerry. He's called "hunky" and listed as one of the nation's hottest bachelors. Tonight John Kerry's daughters will be on stage. These good-looking, polite, and well-scrubbed young people should appeal to... parents.
But what do young people see in all this?
Podium time often goes to veteran politicians who are older. Major reporting assignments often go to the most veteran journalists and they are older. Nothing wrong with that, but I wonder how it looks to young people.
Perhaps a better question is: Are young people watching the convention? According to Al's Morning Meeting (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=69131) several states struggle to rouse a turnout percentage in two digits among voters under age 25.
So what are they thinking?
I contacted a small group of under 30, college educated men and women at a fine school in south Florida (ours). Most said they didn't have time for the convention. They're occupied with family, school, work, and survival tasks like cleaning and shopping.
Here are a few comments.
Elizabeth Carr said:
The coverage is boring and too scripted. I want to know what the public thinks, not these old senators.I come from a family that has always watched political events, but even my family is bored. Maybe the public has just had so much hoopla before the convention that we're -- or I'm -- conventioned out already.
Robin Sloan said:
I am paying attention, but barely.I watched the first night but missed the second two. I had a vague sense of what was happening -- Barack Obama on Tuesday, John Edwards last night -- but managed to miss it both nights 'cause I was busy doing other things.
I watched PBS on Monday night. I've been reading nytimes.com updates this week, and I clicked over to CSPAN.org to download a video of Barack Obama's speech during the day yesterday.
When I did watch, on Monday, it was strictly in the background; I had the TV on while I cleaned stuff up around my apartment, went online, etc. I did sit down for Bill Clinton's speech.
I appreciate C-SPAN's coverage -- especially the online video archive -- the most. It's cool to just be able to download a single speech & watch it, with no commentary.
And one young voter went into greater detail.
Matt Thompson said:
I've been watching bits and pieces of the convention itself, all on CSPAN.org. The only pieces of it I watched live were the Clintons' Monday night speeches. For coverage of it, I've been skimming pretty quickly over the major papers and blogs (and the L.A. Times' blog watch is my favorite place to look to keep track of those), but I keep coming back to Slate for some good punditry, and The American Prospect, which has been doing some great convention blogging AND coverage of the coverage.
In general, the convention is a show, and often a darn good one (Patti LaBelle!). It's millions of dollars spent trying to make politics as exciting and entertaining as possible. We spend so much time and energy the rest of the year trying to do the same thing that I don't know why we can't just sit back and let them do the work two times every four years. Which isn't, of course, to say there's not a place for the media to add context to the claims and strategies presented. This is the Democrats attempting to tell a story, and the press gets to provide the DVD commentary.
Most of the mainstream media coverage I've seen has been from the print media, and it hasn't heartened me. Today's NYT top story? A news analysis by Adam Nagourney, headlined "Obstacles await Kerry after convention concludes." Enlightening. If this article were on Slate, it would be a bulleted list, it would have a lighthearted voice, it would be tagged as an "Explainer" column, it would be headlined, "What's Ahead for Kerry?" and I might actually make it to the bottom.
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