For as long as most everyone alive can remember, the two major party conventions have taken place in packed arenas, but the coronavirus pandemic obviously nixed those plans this year. Even so, the conventions will go on in virtual form, starting with the Democratic National Convention this week. And CNN is slated to provide wall-to-wall coverage each night of the convention.
The official start time each night of the DNC is 9 p.m. PT/6 p.m. PT, and it’s been a packed week so far. Our keynote speakers thus far have been Sen. Bernie Sanders and former First Lady Michelle Obama on Monday, Dr. Jill Biden on Tuesday, and former President Barack Obama and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Wednesday.
The big show finally winds down on Thursday, the last night of the Democratic National convention. The 9 p.m. hour will bring us speeches and comments from Sen. Cory Booker, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Sen. Chris Coons, and Andrew Yang.
And the main event, the thing that the whole week has been leading toward, is Joe Biden’s formal acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president. Biden’s speech, which will likely be the longest of the convention, will close everything out.
Somewhere in there we’ll also get a musical performance from The Chicks.
As you might expect, CNN will cover the convention heavily, with coverage each day beginning at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash and John King will be running the show for the first four hours of coverage, with Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon taking over at midnight ET. A whole host of CNN contributors will also chime in, and all the speeches will be shown in their entirety.
In order to watch CNN’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention, you’ll have to jump through the standard hoops. That is to say, you’ll either need to find the channel on cable, or use a valid TV provider login to stream it on CNN.com or via the CNNgo app, which is available on mobile devices and TV streaming boxes. There won’t be a free option for CNN’s coverage.
But the convention itself will be freely available from the Democrats, who will stream the entire convention live on the convention site, as well as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and everywhere else people stream things — it’ll even be on the gaming site Twitch.
So if you just wanna see the convention itself and don’t care about commentary from CNN or other cable news talking heads, then you can do that at no cost as long as you have access to the internet at any of the links in the previous paragraph.