"Welcome Silence"?

From one of many article from the NYT:

Mr. Obama brought the crowd to its feet many times to cheer and applaud, but perhaps just as importantly for audiences back home, for almost 50 minutes he silenced the ceaseless chatter of television anchors and commentators who had insistently put their own stamp and faces on one of the most exciting political conventions in modern times.

People do want to watch: the audience for cable news coverage this week was about double what it was in 2004. Yet despite the huge public fascination, the three major networks limited their coverage to an hour a night, a prime-time patchwork of highlight reels, catchup snippets of live speeches, and commentary.

Anchors at conventions used to serve as omniscient narrators; at this convention, they mostly served as human V-chips blocking live speeches with their own palaver and predictions.

The broadcast networks long ago ceded gavel-to-gavel coverage to cable and, more recently, to the Internet and news Web sites. Concerned citizens have more ways than ever to follow political events, but it requires ingenuity and patience to cobble together a coherent narrative.

And even the 24-hour cable news channels proved unreliable at times, giving too much screen time to their gassiest anchors.

Of the three cable news networks, CNN was the least intrusive: Wolf Blitzer and his colleagues were willing to let speakers speak for themselves. When Martin Luther King III spoke on Thursday, so did Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who chose to entertain his viewers with a Doonesbury cartoon about Mr. Obama and the Clintons that also featured Mr. Olbermann and his co-host, Chris Matthews. (Fox News mostly focused on Mr. McCain’s possible choice for a running mate, but raced back to the convention when Sheryl Crow took the stage.)

It’s a bad reading of the audience. For most of the convention, CNN — staid, stable and anchored by fewer egomaniacs — won higher ratings than the other cable news channels, as well as ABC and CBS. And Wednesday, CNN was neck and neck with NBC, and for a while even ahead, suggesting that when a political event is this interesting, television commentators are less so.