Is political coverage changing?....

This comment is a little half-baked, it's tentative, anyway, here goes….seems to me that the nature of political news coverage has changed in the last 10 days.

At least the online news coverage….I don't watch TV so I can't speak for the cable TV talking heads.

A few days before the Republican convention started, I started to feel like the online news sites—Politico, The Hill, Washington Post site, Los Angeles Times site, CNN.com, the other dot.coms, etc.—had become more passive, less substantial, less interested in coverage of policies and platforms.

It seemed like the news sites and pundits were shifting their M.O., starting to focus more on campaign tactics, which candidate's surrogate is speaking where, who's speaking on which night at the GOP convention, Romney's "likeability," and my absolute least favorite topic: "what [fill in candidate's name] has to do to win."

It seems like the news media apparatus is blindly waiting for the campaigns to just do stuff, so it can be reported. It seems like the media and the talking heads are simply reporting the partisan "talking points" put out by the two campaigns. It seems like there's more focus on covering the so-called "gaffes" and trying to provoke the "howler" responses with deliberate "gotcha" questions. It seems like it's not journalism, it's more like whisper down the alley….

Case in point: the distastefully unending reporting and analysis of Clint Eastwood's "Outer Limits" performance at the Republic convention. That was a trivial, unfortunate sideshow, but it's become a main event.

But not for me.

What Romney didn't say.....

First take on Republican convention....

Why vote for incumbents?