AP Wire | 08/01/2004 | Cable Filled Networks' Void at Convention

Good article on coverage of the convention last week. An excerpt:

The people on the podium were least visible on Fox News Channel.

While CNN and MSNBC carried Gore's 15-minute speech in its entirety, Fox looked in for one minute. CNN and MSNBC listened to Carter for 16 minutes, while Fox telecast five minutes live, somewhere in the middle of his speech.

Fox had about five minutes of Sen. Edward Kennedy's nearly half-hour speech live on the air and three minutes of Sharpton's, while the others carried most or all of them.

During the beginning of Sharpton's speech, Fox carried a taped O'Reilly interview with ABC's Peter Jennings. After providing a taste of Sharpton, O'Reilly cut away to talk to two print journalists about his own interview with filmmaker Michael Moore the previous night.

On the convention's first night, the camera trained on O'Reilly in Fox's Fleet Center skybooth while Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski spoke behind him to the convention. (None of the networks carried her speech.)

"Somebody's out there screaming about something," O'Reilly said. "I don't know what it is and it really doesn't matter at this point."

After some critics questioned Fox's short attention span for Gore and Carter, O'Reilly - ringleader of the "no spin zone" - explained the next night that his mission was to provide viewers with perspective rather than propaganda.

In other words: they decide, they report.

"The newspaper pinheads claim because we aren't broadcasting the speeches we're not fair," he said. "That, of course, (is) a bunch of baloney."

Here is the article.
AP Wire | 08/01/2004 | Cable Filled Networks' Void at Convention: "The people on the podium were least visible on Fox News Channel.While CNN and MSNBC carried Gore's 15-minute speech in its entirety, Fox looked in for one minute. CNN and MSNBC list"

It will be interesting to see if Fox gives an equal amount of time and similar quality of coverage to the Republicans.