There were Republicans there, too, but they were a minority. Specifically, the ratio was 7 to 10. The assembled G.O.P. delegates at the San Francisco convention numbered 1,308. The personnel sent by the television networks to cover the event numbered 1,825.
They covered it all right—so expansively and so expensively that it might seem picayune even to consider the mistakes they inadvertently committed along the way. But it must be understood that political conventions are the intramural Olympics of television. The networks' panoply of glimpsed emotions, analyses, quips and radioactive poop are...