All I have to say about Wednesday night's cable of coverage of the DNC is WILL THESE PEOPLE PLEASE SHUT UP?

Thanks to the endless prattle (particularly among ego-tripping MSNBC pundits), I nearly missed an unexpected barn-burner of a speech by John Kerry (which I managed to catch, in part, on CNN and C-SPAN). And I completely missed Tammy Duckworth's speech, which my girlfriend told me about after she listened to it on public radio while at work.

My advice to one and all is to watch it on C-SPAN tonight. I guarantee the electricity on stage is going to be a lot more interesting than the wind-powered commentary on the sidelines.

Boys, boys, break it up.

If you've been watching MSNBC lately for the Democratic conevention (it's The Place for Politics, after all) you may have said those words to your TV screen more than once. Can't windy know-it-alls get along?

First, nighttime co-anchors Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann ganged up on morning guy Joe Scarborough, mocking him when he suggested that McCain's attack ads against Obama may be paying off in the polls.

Then, Scarborough gave a schoolyard bully-boy smackdown to correspondent David Schuster for disagreeing with him about withdrawing from Iraq. (Scarborough actually said he didn't care whether Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki gets killed after we leave. Classy.)

Last night, things got really awwwwkward between Matthews and Olbermann, when the latter formed one hand into the universally-recognized gesture for blah-blah-blah after Matthews went on a bit too long (you think?) about Hillary Clinton's speech later that evening. That's when Matthews got snippy. DO NOT tell that guy to shut up.

Meanwhile, over at Fox News, where there's nary a shred of disunity, a decision was made to cut off Mark Warner's keynote speech so that Obama's link to 60s radical Bill Ayers could be treated as breaking news. To be fair to Fox, Warner's speech was kinda boring.

There's a local component to CNN's two-part "Black in America," which premieres tonight at 9.

In April, as part of CNN's "Black in America" college tour to promote and gather material for the special, about a dozen people involved with the production visited North Carolina Central University in Durham.

"They were trying to find i-reporters for each one of the HBCU schools," says visiting lecturer Dr. Brett Chambers. "They wanted us to encourage our students to send in i-reports. They would pick one student from each HBCU school to be that school's i-reporter."

The winner from NCCU was Erica Horne, then a senior in the school's video production class. You can view her report here.

Another treat for the students was a visit from CNN anchor T.J. Holmes in Chambers' Mass Media and Society class.

"He's young, the students can relate to him — he's got some female fans," Chambers says. "He was really cool with the students. The students listened to what he had to say. He and I were kidding around. I said, 'You know, I can say the same thing you say, and they'll ignore me.'"

CNN's "Black in America" airs Wednesday and Thursday at 9 p.m.