Ever since the 1980s, the conventions, whose newslessness has elicited vigorous complaints from the media, have been oriented to television audiences, not to journalists. So, what does it mean when Ted Koppel decides not to cover a political convention because it does not live up to his criteria of newsworthiness?

 Sig Mickelson, who directed the first CBS television coverage of a political convention in 1952, recalls that from the beginning he and his colleagues found the convention's routines, like the pledge of allegiance, the national anthem, the invocation, and the welcoming speeches, "purely ceremonial" matters of little interest. Instead they decided to "approach the conventions as a very large and complex news story." And so television began the practice of not transmitting everything on the convention floor, but breaking away as necessary to tell the story behind the assembly and to focus on what was "really" going on.

To cover a convention "as news" is to report on any aspects of the convention that (a) offer up unanticipated events (b) initiated by leading political actors or implicating them and (c) concerning proximately or ultimately a matter of public policy. That is what the news media mean by political news.

If you cover conventions this way, then you wait around or probe and prod leading political actors so that you are positioned to be on top of one of those unanticipated events, to be on the trail of a breaking story. But if those leaders are stonewalling like crazy and putting the best face on every possible division, difference, jealousy, and rage, there is going to be no news.

But does that mean there is no politics?

Politics in a democracy is a process of many parts, centered on the popular manufacture of effective governing coalitions whose legitimacy is underwritten by the creation of majorities on election day and by favorable polls between elections.

Politics does not always take the recognizable form of news. There are at least four reasons for this. First, politics happens not only with leading political actors but with people who call in to talk radio, join a taxpayer revolt, organize to elect "Christian" candidates to local school boards, or harbor a deep grievance about the BATF raid in Waco. The media can't send 15,000 journalists to these sites as they did to the newsless conventions.

 Second, politics sometimes happens not only far from leading political actors but far from a nearby deadline. Elections conveniently happen at regular intervals that the media can anticipate, but coalition-building both in the general public and in the legislative halls can be slow, irregular, and mostly invisible. As Max Weber put it, politics is "a strong and slow boring of hard boards."

Third, politics happens in the emotional enthusiasm built by rituals. Journalists are bored silly by candidates' standard stump speeches, but these speeches satisfy the political urges of crowd after crowd, exciting involvement and renewing faith. The media largely show contempt for the party atmosphere of political conventions. But the life of the party is very much the life of the party, even if it isn't news.

Fourth, politics happens in the old-fashioned way, through the persuasive power of words, through rhetoric. Everyone observes the technical sophistication and TV-centric character of the conventions, but isn't it remarkable that, as much as ever, the conventions are built around speeches from the rostrum?

Journalists operate in their heads (though not always in practice) on what we might call the Progressivist fallacy: that politics is not ritual or rhetoric but policy. In fact, policy matters have usually been a small part of American political campaigns. In the eighteenth century, voters were not expected to have any ideas about or interest in policies. They were supposed to judge candidates for office by their character and were expected to take the candidates' social standing in the community as a pretty good proxy for character.

In the nineteenth century, voters were expected to vote loyally for members of their own party -- and their allegiance to party was normally much more connected to their ethnocultural identity than to the party platforms. As for presidential candidates, they were figureheads designed to help galvanize popular enthusiasm, and so war heroes were a staple. That enthusiasm, however, was to be hitched to a party, not a cause, and candidates were not expected to have any policy ideas of their own. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century parties divided, as Richard Hofstadter said, "over spoils, not issues."

In the twentieth century, we have accepted as our generic civic ideology that citizens should be well-informed about policies -- "the issues" -- and should be swayed not by person or even party but by a rational appraisal of which candidate would best serve the individual's and the country's interests.

 But sometimes politics is rhetoric, not policy; it is a mood or the words that evoke one. It is the speeches at the convention, out there for everyone to hear. No breaking story, no skull duggery to be unearthed, just plain words were the most important part of the conventions this year. If politics is sometimes hard to see because it is invisible, in this case it was hard to see because it was right in front of our faces.

The media act as cheerleaders for the institution of the presidential campaign, but only as they conceive it. Journalists want there to be a contest. And they want the contest to be about something. It is not sufficient that it be about a prize -- the White House and its patronage; it must be about the fate of the nation.

Perhaps, in 1996, the election does not rise to that eminence; few elections do. Perhaps the clearest thing the election reveals about the direction of the country is that there isn't one or that no one can name it. But this means only that politics is not coughing up news; it does not mean there's no politics. Most of what matters in life, and a lot of what matters in politics, never makes the papers. Journalists on high horses who put down politics for failing to be news do not advance journalism, but they may diminish politics.

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