The TV cameras transformed Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey’s five o’clock shadow into “a full beard, something like Abraham Lincoln’s,” another columnist wrote. If speakers “could see themselves as the television audience does, they’d sit down and weep.”
In the hot, non-air-conditioned hall in July, “the intense light demanded by those primitive television cameras raised dark patches of sweat” on the speakers and their clothing, NBC News President Reuven Frank wrote years later.
This week, TV networks will be facing new kinds of challenges adjusting convention coverage because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Democrats, who’d planned to gather in Milwaukee from Monday through Thursday, plan a nearly virtual convention to nominate former vice president Joe Biden. He and his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, will deliver their speeches at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del. The Republicans moved their convention from Charlotte, to…
