Walter Kirn, who is not a regular political journalist and whose time in Charlotte was his first convention, found the pervasive groupthink among writers intellectually stultifying:
To disagree with the conventional wisdom even as it’s being born around you—and even as you’re trying with all your might to anticipate and even shape it—is a profoundly disorienting experience. It makes you wonder if you were there at all, or if there even exists a there to be at. Ideally, a convention would be a ground zero of factuality, an objective reality in a shifting universe of spin and opinion and second-order commentary. But the further you get inside one, I’m discovering, the more deliriously lost you feel, particularly to the self that you came in with. How does one both enter the group mind and stay inside one’s own mind? It’s a challenge.
That's one reason I don't go. It's a television infomercial best judged by watching the television!
(Image from Tom Scott's Journalism Warning Labels)
The Dish 