DAN RATHER says more people would watch test pattern

[rainstorm]

Ed Bark: A Rather cynical look at conventions

12:48 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 28, 2004


By Ed Bark / The Dallas Morning News



BOSTON — Frankly, Dan Rather is a little bored. Make that a lot bored.

This week's Democratic and next month's Republican conventions will be his 24th, 25th and maybe last. But so what?

"In the grand scheme of things, whether they're my last conventions or not matters not at all," he said Tuesday from the ramshackle CBS News compound. "The real question is whether this is among the last conventions. That's what's important."

Minuscule Nielsen ratings for Monday's opening night have Mr. Rather convinced that these quadrennial gatherings of party faithful are badly in need of an extreme makeover.

"At one time they were kind of like the Super Bowl in a presidential campaign year," he said. "They're now like a preseason NFL game. ... You have to take a speed-yawning course to get through some of this stuff, even when you're in the convention hall. I could see people nodding off, and I couldn't blame them. In this almost catatonic state, conventions will disappear unless somebody in one party at least decides to rethink them and bring them back in a form where they matter. If we were on for three hours a night, in a lot of places a test pattern would get better ratings."

CBS joined ABC and NBC in skipping Tuesday night's session. One hour of prime-time coverage is planned each for Wednesday and Thursday while cable news networks C-SPAN and PBS go "gavel-to-gavel" in various forms. For Fox News Channel, that meant largely ignoring the podium on Monday night, save for Bill Clinton's speech. The network's Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and others instead happily pounded away at the Democrats.

Mr. Rather has a few remedies in mind to save the conventions from themselves. The most provocative: "Put them up for bids to make them a special television event. It may be to the parties' benefit not to have the conventions spread over so many channels. The National Basketball Association doesn't do that with their playoff games."

Mr. Rather also would shorten the conventions to two days, hold them on weekends and convene them at a time of year when a larger pool of viewers might be available.

"CBS didn't decide to hold a convention in the dog days of July, when most people go to the beach or take their families on vacation," he said. "We didn't make the decision that what were originally designed to be nominating conventions now don't nominate anybody. We didn't make the decision that delegates would be used as props."

Mr. Rather, 72, is old enough to remember being roughed up on the convention floor during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. He doesn't expect the parties to stage a brawl for the benefit of television cameras. But he sees today's conventions as fund-raisers ("Get out your checkbooks and come"), a "happy hunting ground for lobbyists" and a "networking" mechanism for political cronies and powerbrokers.

"We're very close now to putting on conventions only for people whose life's work is politics," Mr. Rather said. "And the audience has spoken by saying, 'This doesn't have anything to do with my life. I've got better things to do.' "

He had his best time so far at Bill and Hillary Clinton's pre-convention party on Sunday night.

"The Clintons played the part of political rock stars, which they are. The party had great energy, pretty good music, too, by the way. But it was strictly a party. Otherwise there's no juice here. It's the case of the bland leading the bland in the belief that that wins elections."