In this election year, to be a voter watching the conversation between the media and the politicians—or, now that there are six times as many reporters as there are delegates at the party conventions, between the media and the media—is a bit like being an invalid who is forced to listen to his doctors and his relatives discussing what is to be done with him as if he were not in the room. Will the voters go for this? Will they be turned off by that? Hey, Doc? I’m right here! But the media, like the doctors and the relatives, think they know what’s best for me, and my views on the subject would only be a distraction from the highly sophisticated process of ratiocination by which they have already discovered it. Why do I employ such highly trained professionals, after all, if I am only going to try to tell them what to think?

Thus, for all their complaint about the “scripted” conventions, and their cutting back on the coverage given to floor speeches, the media do not stint themselves of their opportunities for “analysis.” In fact, the more scripted the convention, and therefore the more discounted its ostensible meanings, the more necessary it is for the media’s expertise to inform us of what it all reallymeans. “Yes, yes,” says the doctor patronizingly, “of course we know you’re impressed with Mr. Kerry’s record of military service. We knew that by our scientific methods long before you