NEW YORK – Some TV viewers might not be aware that former President Carter, Al Gore and Al Sharpton all spoke at last week’s Democratic convention.

They certainly heard from Bill O’Reilly, Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews, though.

It was a pundits convention for the cable news channels, which were on the air many more hours than the big broadcasters. To some, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC provided a necessary filter for a staged event. Others believe they simply talked too much amongst themselves.

Asked about TV coverage of the convention, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told USA Today: “The talking heads keep talking, and you can’t hear anything.”

“The notion that the (broadcast) networks have offered that they don’t have to cover the convention because you can watch it on cable is actually not true,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a media research group. “If you want to watch the convention, you have to watch PBS, C-SPAN or ABC’s digital channel.”

While CNN and MSNBC carried Gore’s 15-minute speech in its entirety, Fox looked in for one minute. CNN and MSNBC listened to Carter for 16 minutes, while Fox telecast five minutes live, somewhere in the middle of his speech.

Fox had about five minutes of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s nearly half-hour speech live on the air and three minutes of Sharpton’s, while the others carried most or all of them.

After some critics questioned Fox’s short attention span for Gore and Carter, O’Reilly – ringleader of the “no spin zone” – explained the next night that his mission was to provide viewers with perspective rather than propaganda.

In other words: they decide, they report.

It’s a defiant stance for a cable channel in the cross-hairs of liberal political groups this summer and the subject of a documentary, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” that claims Fox shows a pattern of support for the Republican agenda.

But with conventions nothing more than extended political commercials, Fox’s news judgment is a necessary service, said Brent Bozell, founder of the conservative media watchdog, the Media Research Center. He said he hopes the network does the same at the GOP convention.

“I have no problem with any network saying, “We’re not going to focus on the fluff that they give us. We’re going to analyze this,”‘ Bozell said.

While not editing as tightly as Fox, CNN and MSNBC both spent more time showing its personalities talking to each other than sending reporters out to interview delegates or see what, if anything, was happening behind the scenes.

The convention was the first chance most Americans had to see Kerry present his case for an extended period, he said. All of the networks – including ABC, CBS and NBC – carried Kerry’s speech in full.

The cable news networks seemed to use the convention as a backdrop to promote their regular prime-time programming, rather than covering it, he said; and in prime time, these are all-talk networks instead of news networks.

“Who’s responsible, then, for letting the public see this?” Rosenstiel asked. “None of the people who have access to our homes over the public airwaves feel an obligation to allow us to see the convention.”