Where were the floor reporters cutting a swath of energy through the Fleet Center as State Senator Barack Obama of Illinois electrified the Monday night audience of the Democratic National Convention and created a new national political persona? Not working. Their show didn’t start until 10 p.m. Why weren’t the anchormen looking down at the floor as Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan exulted the crowd? Peter Jennings was watching helplessly as his wacky digital network failed to give the politician a superimposed identification under her name. The rest were too busy putting on their makeup and getting ready for their paltry one hour of network prime time. What happened to the gigantic headsets with the network logos, and the men and women hoisting outsized microphones to do their duty? Conventional journalism went missing from the 2004 Democratic National Convention this week, and its absence marked, for me, a sad denouement in coverage of what was once a wondrous quadrennial television event. But what else can you expect from an era in which reporters spend most of their time locating the camera lens in front of them? The news itself barely seems to matter anymore.

Only a half-century ago, television discovered a national political convention’s value as a dramatic opportunity to grab viewers. The networks battled each other with great flair and drama every fourth summer to tell that year’s political story. Reporters made frenzied dashes across convention floors in search of fame and history.The memo ry of great network reporters – including Roger Mudd, Dan Rather,Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Bob Schieffer, Lesley Stahl – roaming the convention floor with oversized headsets and mammoth microphones still lingers among political junkies starved for entertainment. (C-

SPAN has actually followed ESPN’s lead and is showing old conventions on a “classic” channel, like re-broadcasting great old ballgames.) We all loved those extravaganzas, with their manufactured messages and flashes of intrigue – at times elevated to an event of true historic magnitude, like the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the riots outside its doors.

But there was plenty to cover in Boston this week, and the blame lies with the whiny, sanctimonious anchors – Messrs. Rather and Brokaw in particular – who love to complain about coverage, but then offer so little besides their own overexposed faces. Still, they’ve managed to make an issue out of the networks’ disinterest, as though it reflected a lack of patriotism – not news judgment. They even got the all-important talkshow hosts behind their knee-jerk lament. “You know how much time the major networks are going to devote to convention coverage?” Jay Leno asked one recent night. “Three hours. Three hours total. One hour a night for three nights to pick a president. That’s about one-tenth of the time we devote to finding an American Idol.”

This time, praise belongs mostly to ABC News, for its expensive (and reward-free) gavel-to-gavel coverage, called “ABC News Now,” on channel 730 of Time Warner Cable, accessible only to those with digital television, and over the Internet. I’d do some things differently with it – I missed the supers, and could have lived without the incessant trivia crawl – but overall it became my channel of choice for convention coverage this week. If Mr. Jennings weren’t quite the constant presence I’d been led to expect, he still showed his face frequently, and I always relished his peerless ability to yak extemporaneously on TV.

Somehow, I can absorb Mr. Jennings’s delivery and manner more easily than his competition; Mr. Rather came off a little odd, as always, and the NBC correspondents as usual didn’t measure up. It’s with reporters that ABC excels. Every so often Mr. Jennings will jaw with George Stephanopoulos about speeches and spin, and their banter beats anything else going on the other networks. (The ongoing Schieffer-Rather conversation ranks among the most tedious on television.) Bob Woodruff may not have the gravitas of a Roger Mudd, but he does have the jawline of a Gucci model. Chris Cuomo’s starting to get interesting; maybe he’ll amount to something after all. And ABC’s anchorwomen-in-waiting (Elizabeth Vargas and Claire Shipman) excel at their task.

By contrast, Mr. Brokaw looks listless and tired; he never seemed to quite make it onto the convention floor and tended to prefer skybox interviews with celebrities like Caroline Kennedy and Howard Dean when better stories might be unfolding elsewhere. Mr. Rather shares that aversion to the floor; he’d sooner bore us silly with his homespun homilies, anyway. It’s always about face time: They all want to look at the camera and see that red light go on. You can see it in Brian Williams’s eye too, the searching for the lens. That has become the crucial journey for a network correspondent in the E! Decade. It won’t be long before Jon Stewart gets his own parody, and we come full circle. When that happens, maybe we can start covering conventions the right way again – the way we used to, with cameras pointed at the news.

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What is up with Katie Couric? She seems to have given up all outside pursuits in order to commit herself more fully to her life’s true mission: the perfect tan. It seems odd to me that this champion of cancer prevention – who underwent a televised colonoscopy to promote the procedure – devotes herself to a pursuit widely believed to cause a cancer of its own. But more to the point, it looks weird.