Media Ignore Floor Drama But Flood the Zone on Melania’s Plagiarism

If you want to understand why Americans rank the media somewhere between multilevel marketers and parking enforcement officers in terms of occupational respect, the wall-to-wall coverage of Melania Trump’s plagiarism is an excellent case study. Even Donald Trump is happy that the press are covering his wife’s speech rather than the fact that this has been a bitterly divided convention:

On Monday, a sitting U.S. senator, Mike Lee, led an attempted delegate revolt on the floor of the Republican National Convention in order to defeat the rules package at the convention.The rules as written would have definitively bound all delegates to ensure Trump received the necessary votes to be the nominee. This revolt was quashed when the convention chair, Arkansas congressman Steve Womack, made a hasty and dubious ruling on a disputed voice vote. Calls for a roll call vote were ignored and Womack simply walked off stage. The whole process looked (and sounded) corrupt.

The Colorado delegation walked out in protest. “I have never seen the floor abandoned like that,” said Lee. And if you’re looking for a symbolic narrative, Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is best known outside of Trumpland for making a (somewhat literal) killing lobbying on behalf of authoritarian thugs specialize in crushing dissent in their own countries. Manafort later joked about a death threat made against an anti-Trump delegate from Utah. And in case you still think all of this Snidely Whiplash characterization of Manafort is over the top, Manafort has been trying to dismiss “reports that [the Trump campaign] lobbied to lessen support for Ukraine against Russia and Russian-backed rebels in the Republican party platform.”

Now political reporters often openly romanticize convention the era when delegates still duked out nominations on the floor, instead of the modern era where they are little more than a theatrical fait accompli. I think there were approximately a thousand “explainers” written this year on why this is the most drama anyone’s seen at an American political convention in decades.

And yet, we’re going on 36 hours of coverage of Melania Trump’s speech at the RNC. If you’re watching cable news, the coverage has been pretty overwhelming. Perhaps her alleged plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s previous speech should be ignored, but are we really surprised by this given the general unapologetic incompetence of the Trump campaign? And do we really care that the candidate’s wife repeated some boilerplate sentiments from Michelle Obama that were vacuous and unremarkable to begin with?

At the same time, earlier today I spoke with a well-known cable pundit who said his wife called him as the delegate revolt was happening. She was watching C-SPAN and said they had been covering the drama on the floor for nearly an hour. She wanted to know why the cable news networks hadn’t picked up on it yet. Most of the media barely covered the revolt as it was happening, and quickly brushed it aside to spend the next day talking about the horror that is the supposed ethical lapses of the candidate’s Eastern European supermodel third wife.

Now as far as political transgressions go, unlike the delegate revolt, the problems of Melania Trump’s speech may be worth noting but they are comparatively inconsequential. The fact the media seems incapable of making this obvious distinction says volumes about why this country’s political dialogue is so dysfunctional.