INTERNET REPORTERS MOSTLY STICK TO CONVENTION

Stop the presses! You can view the Republican National Convention from seven
simultaneous camera angles, with just a click of your mouse button!

On second thought, keep the presses running.

It isn't news that Internet journalists are blanketing the Philadelphia
event, which ends Thursday night, or that they'll descend on Los Angeles
soon for the Democratic Party's shindig. Guess what? Cyber-reporters cover
everything these days. Some of them do it very well indeed. And Big
Stories -- the ones certified by the traditional media -- get more Web
traffic than little ones.

This time, however, the big story isn't news. Both major-party national
conventions are deliberate snooze-a-thons, engineered and scripted by
parties that long ago excised all spontaneity from the nominating and
platform-making processes and now use the conventions solely as
public-relations exercises.

For spoon-fed PR we need a zillion Web sites? Maybe the big television
networks, whose abandonment of convention coverage has been said to have
spurred many of the Web efforts, were right to all but ditch the conventions
in the first place.

This is no defense of the TV broadcasters, who strong-armed lawmakers into
giving away public resources -- the airwaves -- but rejected any notion of
commensurate public service. The broadcasters long ago abandoned any
pretense of actually covering real news on more than an occasional basis or
creating programming that appeals to something beyond people's lowest common
cultural biases. Greed and civic irresponsibility are the hallmarks of the
broadcasting companies, from which the majority of Americans get their news.

The major political parties, meanwhile, have long since made it clear to
average Americans that our participation in the nominating process is at
best incidental. The Republican establishment crowned George II behind
closed doors well over a year ago and raised so much money for him that he
was unbeatable in the primaries. Similarly, the Democratic establishment
gave Gore the Younger enough of a head start that he would probably have
defeated Bill Bradley even if Bradley had ever awaked from his campaign
sleepwalking. And the platforms, which describe the parties' goals, had
about as much genuine public input as an election in the former East
Germany.

The action from the podium at a political convention may be all but
meaningless. I'm not watching any of it, except the acceptance speeches of
the candidates (and I'll tape those first off C-Span, which has the courtesy
to shut up and let people speak without interruption).

If most of the convention speeches don't matter, the same is not true of the
electoral process' results. These officials, after all, collect and divvy up
a massive chunk of the GDP each year, and their decisions affect our
fundamental liberties and economic well-being. Maybe they're lying, but we
have to care about what they say and what positions they take.

So I'm reading a fair amount of convention coverage, at least the stuff that
truly looks into the serious issues that the candidates will have to deal
with if elected. For that, the Web has been invaluable, because no single
publication brings us everything we should read.

A parallel, ``shadow convention'' has also been running in Philadelphia this
week, and will take place in Los Angeles as well. It's somewhat overhyped,
and a key organizer is Arianna Huffington, a publicity-hound commentator
whose public style has all the charm of fingernails on a blackboard. But the
shadow convention (www.shadowconventions.com) is addressing some issues the
Republican and Democratic establishments find too difficult to handle.

The shadow convention is tackling the growing scandal of campaign finance,
where ``one dollar, one vote'' has replaced ``one person, one vote'' in
every way that counts. It's examining the increasingly obvious damage that
the foolish, failed drug war has inflicted on this nation.

Some of the most substantive speeches in Philadelphia this week have
discussed these very issues, which the powers-that-be in both parties are
pondering mainly to reaffirm the status quo or fake reform. The mainstream
print media and some Web sites have given the shadow convention a modest
amount of coverage, but the broadcasters have all but ignored it. What a
surprise.

Instead of pointing multiple cameras at the convention floor and streaming
the images to our computer screens, Web journalists should be looking at the
issues -- at what will happen if we elect these people and what has brought
our society to the point where we are.

Aim 7 million cameras at a vacuous event, and it's still vacuous.