Why do cable news channels talk over everything at the conventions?

Here's something you probably didn't see last night: my senator, addressing the Democratic National Convention in prime time. Now, you may not care what Claire McCaskill had to say, but you'd think CNN would at least take a passing interest. Instead, as a reader wrote me this morning, "we were subjected to the bloviations of Wolf and company. Unfiltered coverage indeed."

When it comes to covering the political conventions, in fact, the cable news channels are really no improvement over the broadcast networks. They'd still rather listen to themselves talk than the people up on stage. They just do it longer.

I don't get it. These channels (not just CNN) spend millions of dollars schlepping people and resources to an event and then spend 95 percent of their time not airing it. If someone tried that during the Oscars, they'd never work in that town again.

Well, we're told, that's because a political convention is nothing but one long infomercial and people wouldn't want to watch that. What an asinine argument. Almost every TV channel out there airs infomercials and people do watch them. In fact, infomercials are one of the few truly broadcast TV programs still out there. An amazing range of people watch them, from those who get caught up in the product to those who find the mock enthusiasm of the presenters hilarious to those independent voters who sorta don't watch infomercials except when they do, and then sometimes, darn it all, they find themselves buying the product.

Conventions spew out tons of information that don't really need mediating -- you either get it or you don't -- and they serve the purpose of getting everyday people (not just journalists) thinking about the fall campaign. How is that not newsworthy? Why do you need Wolf Blitzer talking over every minute of it?

I'm not saying don't talk over the convention program. But really, it's not as though there was wall-to-wall speechifying going on up there on stage. John Legend and the band must have played for at least 30 minutes last night, in prime time. That talk-show thingy that Sherrod Brown and others were doing -- that went on too long, but a few minutes of it wouldn't have killed CNN (or MSNBC, which I was watching at the time). I mean, I'm sure it doesn't measure up to spending a few minutes more listening to David Gergen, but ...

As for the senator's speech, the one I've embedded above, probably the less said about that, the better. She was more McCaskilly in this brief exchange with the Star's Dave Helling yesterday in Denver:

Still, CNN could've jumped in at the halfway point of her speech (I'm sure they had her script) to at least give people a flavor.

But no. There is this insistence on talking over everything. Everyone except C-SPAN and PBS does it, and it's ridiculous. Jimmy Carter may be older than Methusaleh and reading off a script, but he's JIMMY CARTER, for heaven's sakes! Give him some air time.

And yeah, I'll feel the same way next week, too.

P.S. And by the way, if CNN was worried about holding onto audience while Jimmy Carter was speaking, you know what it could do? It could CHANGE SOME OF THEIR DAMNED CRAWLS that had been running since 7 o'clock that morning! Did you know that the Democrat Convention first had a platform in 1840 -- and it was less than 1000 words????

UPDATE: Harry Shearer responds to this article, plus more clips from Day 2 that you didn't see