[P]HILADELPHIA — Political parties like to brag they are big tent organizations, willing to accept all-comers.
And on that score, there was surely reason for the Democrats to take pride in the collection of Cirque de Soleil style tents inside the police-lined perimeter of the Wells Fargo Arena that made up the media compound at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
Thousands of journalists pounded away on keyboards inside the tents hoping to write copy that would be at the center of the convention media buzz and generate the most clicks, listeners and eyeballs.
The sheer size of the press corps was impressive: Reporters and media staff outnumbered the delegates.
And the mix of nationalities represented by the media spanned the globe. Reporters from India to Italy mixed with American news crews from all over the country, each looked to put their stamp on the four days of events at the Democratic National Convention.
Some of the scribes were more experienced than others. Some had just come from covering the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. For others, this was their first experience covering a stadium-sized event with thousands of players. The events were so vast and tightly controlled that even veteran reporters grumbled about the difficulty of coming up with a unique story line.
Officials with the Democratic National Convention knew how hungry journalists were for any tidbit of news. Activists, too, including supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, knew how to feed scoops to an instant scrum of TV reporters.
Every delegate protest and sit-in at the DNC was staged in or around a media tent, which often guaranteed a response from reporters who are drawn to spectacle like moths to a flame.
To ensure media attention, the protesters often wore wild outfits, and offered up colorful, juicy quotes sprinkled with assertions.
“I would say half of the delegates aren’t going to go with Hillary, no matter what,” Vincent Venditti, a Georgia delegate for Sanders, insisted before a crowd of reporters during a staged walk-out Wednesday.
“They can paint a picture of party unity. There is not unity, obviously. Look around,” he hissed.
Looking around, there were about 100 protesters, a small fraction of the 1,900 Sanders delegates at the convention. About 100 journalists covered the demonstration, which was widely reported as a sign of a party split.
Inside the hall, Democratic Party maestros were doing their best to drown out news of defections and tried to dazzle reporters with the mainstage media messaging of the convention’s theme: “Stronger Together.”
Press releases touting love, peace and harmony were cranked out continuously and the same message was used in speeches that often droned on. The catch phrase “Stronger Together” was inscribed on signs, t-shirts and buttons that helped to remind participants that this was no ordinary circus — this was a convention.
Party unity was the main goal. In Hillary Clinton’s prime time speech Thursday, she used the word “together” 16 times, and thousands of delegates were handed out placards plastered with the word.
Rogue delegates who went off script were surrounded by convention monitors in green vests who insisted that they end the disruption. When Sanders’ fans raised anti-Clinton signs, pro-Clinton delegates pushed their signs in front of them to cover up any sign of fracture.
While every major news outlet had dozens of staffers and seemingly unlimited resources to cover Philadelphia, the show was so well structured that it made it hard at times to dig below the surface. Press access to the floor was restricted to one-hour increments, and after this reporter accidentally went beyond the time limit, credentials were revoked for the rest of the day.
Top party leaders, including ousted DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, huddled in the rafters of the arena, watching the convention hubub from private sky boxes.
Thousands of delegates walked the lower halls of the convention among a host of A-list celebrities. The most prominent news anchors in the arena were also treated like rock stars. Both actor Bradley Cooper and CNN celebrity Anderson Cooper (no relation) were asked for autographs.
As a result, convention coverage was uniformly similar. Most described pockets of lingering frustration with the Democratic Party, which, by week’s end, unified support behind Clinton.
As first pointed out by Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer barely deviated in his coverage of the week’s speeches, calling nearly every one “powerful” without much explanation. (Blitzer was spotted eating at the CNN Grill, but no word on how ‘powerful’ he thought the French Fries were.)
Nate Silver, the editor-in-chief of the polling news site FiveThirtyEight, has frequently indicted campaign news coverage for overusing anecdotal information and making broad generalizations. He said reporters overplay conflict. For example, he said, protesting delegates did not represent the broader views of the American electorate.
“It’s not reflective of the delegates, even,” he said. “One reason it helps to have reporting is to get ahead of the bullshit narratives and make clear in a story that it’s 10 Sanders delegates booing in a room of 15,000 people cheering.”
Silver also pointed out that the story line of unity following a tough primary fight is compelling to reporters because of the contrast. He thought it hard to justify the amount of resources poured into the weeklong coverage, though he acknowledged the disenchantment of some Sanders’ supporters made this convention more newsworthy than others.
“If you went to the Democratic convention in 2012, it felt like you didn’t really need to be there,” he said.
Walking through the Wells Fargo Arena, it was difficult to go 10 feet without bumping into another microphone, another camera, another news crew. Many Sanders delegates were asked the same two questions over and over: whether they were “Bernie or Bust” and whether Clinton is trustworthy.
The Vermont delegation received enormous attention and became a symbol of grief for Sanders supporters. Delegates were swarmed not only by Green Mountain reporters, but a blizzard of other outlets, from students at Brown University to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker.
Reporters looked under every stadium chair for a scoop and jumped when anything out of the ordinary occurred.
When Edgar Baker Phillips, a resident of the U.S. Virgin Islands, walked the convention floor on Tuesday with a chicken mask, he was swarmed by a horde of reporters, asking for his story.
“In the islands, we wake up early in the morning with the chicken crowing,” Phillips said. “We are here today to give Donald Trump a chicken call on November 8th, to let him know when the rooster crow — cock-a-doodle-doo — that he has just lost the election.”
A great photo of Phillips’ chicken head made it onto the New York Times site Wednesday.
While the Democratic and Republican conventions have frequently been nothing more than a political pageant for rising political stars and an opportunity to wear silly costumes, a number have been at the center of real political turmoil.
In 1968, the year both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assasinated, frustration with political elitism and the Vietnam War boiled over into protests on the
streets of Chicago. More than 150 people were injured and 700 were arrested during the tumultuous events in the Windy City.
In 1976, there was a political floor fight over whether President Gerald Ford or then California Gov. Ronald Reagan should be the party’s nominee. A similar struggle emerged in 1980 between President Jimmy Carter and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.
For all the supposed disunity in 2016, Sanders gave a full-throated endorsement of Clinton in his Monday speech. On Tuesday, it was Sanders who formally nominated her to the post.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne said that conventions have morphed from bland parliamentary proceedings to political pageants focused on spinning a message.
“The conventions are now almost entirely political commercials,” Dionne said after an MSNBC interview. “They have basically ceased to be deliberative bodies.”
Dionne said there have been a few interesting signs of party discord — from U.S. Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorse Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention to the rebellion of some Sanders delegates.
“Those events created some tension, but we in the media probably exaggerated it,” he said.
There were a number of unique, important reports out of the convention, including a New York Times piece on the behind-the-scenes of story of Democratic mega donors currying favors at the Philadelphia Ritz-Carlton. There was thoughtful analysis on the historical nature of Clinton’s candidacy, as well as on some of the most compelling convention speeches.
Dionne pointed out that some of his favorite convention stories are so-called “conceptual scoops,” ones that grind the speeches through a historical analysis.
Most of the stories, however, communicated similar ideas, and many focused little on the policy or ideas of the party and instead on the star power on display. A Washington Post story ranked the celebrity speeches. Comedian Sarah Silverman’s plea for Sanders supporters to support Clinton rose to No. 1 on the effectiveness scale.
“You can’t have this many journalists here and not have an oversaturation of coverage,” Dionne said. “So then the question becomes, what set of events are aren’t getting coverage?”
In the hours ahead of each night’s star-studded convention light show were long, wonky caucus meetings concerned with policy on everything from global warming to criminal justice reform.
Many of the meetings, from the senior caucus to ones addressing the concerns of minority groups, were sparsely attended by delegates and the press.
After a meeting of the Native American Council, Brandon Yellowbird Stevens, a member of the Oneida Indian Nation of Wisconsin, praised Sanders for meeting with representatives of 90 tribal nations during the primary season. He acknowledged progress in the party’s updated platform, including new commitments to help economically struggling tribes while respecting their sovereignty.
Still, he said, his people’s issues are rarely recognized in the mainstream press.
“I think our issues are always underrepresented,” Stevens said. “We are trying to become part of the narrative, not just when a candidate is in Indian country.”
Josh Fox, an environmental activist and Academy Award-nominated documentarian, said the convention floor was a much more exciting for delegates and reporters than a council meeting Tuesday on climate change, which was lightly attended.
“The political establishment does a lot of razzle dazzle, they can be a lot sexier than the activist side,” Fox said. “But there’s also a lot of fakery there, a lot of lobbying, a lot of money, a lot of graft.”
On Wednesday, a number of Sanders surrogates, including Fox, held their last event in the main media tent. They derided the Democratic party, this time because Sanders surrogate Nina Turner was rejected for a mainstage speaking slot.
The speakers, which included actors Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover, drew a huge scrum of reporters. As Sarandon walked out after the conference, a mob of reporters followed close behind, yelling questions at the her about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and the state of American politics.
Including VTDigger, who asked: “Ms. Sarandon, are there too many press covering you right now? Is this too much?”
No, the Academy Award winner said with a smile, she was used to it all from her glory days in Hollywood when she walked the red carpet.
“It’s like an awards show,” Sarandon said.
It was hard to disagree.
