The same broadcast networks that eagerly devote endless prime-time hours to vacuous sitcoms and unreal “reality shows” couldn’t spare a total of more than a few hours last week for live coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

It’s true that complaining about scant news coverage from NBC, ABC and CBS is a bit like griping about small portions of meals from restaurants that serve lousy food. But still: the conventions are worth watching, if only to keep up with the rhetorical needles that party strategists are trying to thread these days.

Gathering for the convention in Boston, several network anchors participated in a high-profile panel at Harvard University. One of the more interesting moments came when the panelists responded to a question about the scant amount of air time the commercial broadcast networks were devoting to the convention…

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With two words, the governor of California has managed to highlight the confluence of anti-gay bias and misogyny. Open contempt for “girlie men” would have raised fewer eyebrows in the past. Reactions to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s put-down of Democrats in the state legislature — “if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men” — tell us a lot about how far we’ve come. The good news is the media outcry; the bad news is that the outcry hasn’t been stronger.

As a rough gauge of media progress on gender-related issues, consider two editorials that appeared — 88 years apart — in the same newspaper.

About 10 months before the United States entered World War I, the writer Upton Sinclair aimed some barbs at flag-waving militarism…

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Tom Ridge, the federal official in charge of defending the United States against terrorism, was on message when he told a July 14 news conference: “We don’t do politics at Homeland Security.” Such high-level claims of patriotic purity have been routine since 9/11. But in this election year, they’re more ludicrous than ever.

Days earlier, alongside a photo of Ridge, a headline on USA Today’s front page had declared: “Election Terror Threat Intensifies.” There was unintended irony in the headline.

While a real threat of terrorism exists in the United States, we should also acknowledge that an intensifying “election terror threat” is coming from the Bush administration. With scarcely 100 days to go until Election Day, the White House is desperate to wring every ounce of advantage from the American Flag, patriotism, apple pie — and the subject of “terrorism.”

Newsweek reported a week after July Fourth that Ridge’s agency “asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place.” The media response was mostly negative, and the Bush administration proceeded with its intended dual message of portraying a postponement as far-fetched — yet not quite unthinkable…

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Also, see the documentary Hijacking Catastrophe.

The morning after John Kerry announced that John Edwards will be his running mate, powerful newspapers fired warning shots across the bow of the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

“It is likely that Mr. Edwards will be dispatched to critical industrial states like Ohio to talk about jobs, as he did with such force in the primary,” the liberal New York Times editorialized. “We hope that he’ll refrain from falling into protectionist rhetoric in the process.”

Over at the Washington Post, an editorial that voiced less overall enthusiasm for Edwards underscored the same basic concern: “Mr. Edwards improved as a candidate during the primaries, but he also demonstrated, especially toward the end, an unfortunate tendency to cater to popular but irresponsible positions. Mr. Edwards was powerful, even moving, when he spoke about how the country was divided into two Americas, with one tax system, one school system, one health care system for the rich, and an inferior version for everyone else. Yet his lurch toward protectionism on trade was disappointing for a candidate who we thought knew better.”

On the Times op-ed page, two columnists had their say. Conservative William Safire pooh-poohed the new V.P. candidate, calling him “the happy class warrior, the smoothest divisive force in politics today.”

Meanwhile, liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof had a lot of favorable things to say about Edwards…

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A recent Associated Press dispatch – headlined “Gadget May Help Sleepers Choose Dreams” – told the story of a new product that “can be programmed to help sleepers choose what to dream.” Made in Japan, the 14-inch gizmo is called “Dream Workshop.”

After so much progress has been made to ravage the natural environment all around us (fulfilling Francis Bacon’s recommendation that we torture Mother Nature for her secrets), it stands to reason that technology should also besiege our inner nature. But like wild animals and flighty birds, our dreams are loath to be tamed.

“The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind,” Franz Kafka said. Yet overall, dreams are not very marketable. Experienced during sleep, they’re one of the few human activities left that can’t be bought or sold…

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When a federal judge compares George W. Bush to Benito Mussolini, is that newsworthy?

After the conservative daily New York Sun broke the story about a speech by Judge Guido Calabresi of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, few media outlets even mentioned what he had to say.

“In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States … somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power,” Judge Calabresi told attorneys and law students at the American Constitution Society’s annual convention on June 19. “That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power.”

The 71-year-old judge, who was born in Milan before his family left Italy in 1939, added: “The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy.” And Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School, went on: “The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual.”

Referring to the Supreme Court’s post-election decision in 2000…

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Political myth-making goes into overdrive every four years. With presidential campaigns fixated mostly on media, an array of nonstop spin takes its toll while illogic often takes hold: When heroes are absent, they’re invented. When convenient claims are untrue, they’re defended.

Many supporters come to function as enablers — staying silent or mimicking their candidate’s contorted explanations to try to finesse the gaping contradiction. Fast talk substitutes for straight talk. A kind of “covering fire” across media battlefields makes it easier for the candidate to just keep on dissembling.

There are true believers, of course — people who believe every word that comes out of their own mouths when, for instance, they stand at the podium of the Republican or Democratic convention. Whatever the extent of their sincerity, only superlatives will do as speakers unequivocally praise George W. Bush or John Kerry…

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