PBS carries convention momentum into N.Y.

When the Republican National Convention gets underway tonight, PBS will again be alone among the major over-the-air broadcasters to offer full live coverage of events from the podium.

The decision this year by the big broadcast networks to pare their political convention coverage of each party to major speeches on just three of the four nights opened the door for PBS to attract more viewers. The public broadcaster saw its ratings jump 23% from four years ago for its coverage of the Democrats’ gathering in July, to an average of 2.9 million viewers a night. The other over-the-air broadcasters easily topped that by a million viewers or more each in the limited hours of their coverage, but PBS still attracted a larger audience than the all-news cable rivals (which were led by CNN’s average of 2.3 million viewers for the week, followed by Fox News Channel’s 2 million and MSNBC’s 1.3 million).

For the Republican convention, Jim Lehrer will anchor PBS coverage from New York from 5 to 8 nightly and can be seen on KCET.

Elsewhere, cable’s C-SPAN will carry gavel-to-gavel coverage of the podium happenings. In addition, the network has struck a deal with the Time Warner, Cox and Comcast cable systems to offer day-later replays of major convention speeches on systems that have video-on-demand. The C-SPAN website also will have archival replays of major convention speeches.

Cable news networks CNN, Fox News and MSNBC will have full day and evening convention coverage interspersed with commentary and interviews. CNBC’s early evening programs will be broadcast from the convention, as will Comedy Central’s faux news program “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” HDNet will provide nightly coverage in high-definition format. ABC, CBS and NBC will air an hour each, beginning at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Highlights those nights, respectively, are speeches by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vice President Dick Cheney and the nomination acceptance speech by President Bush.

For Los Angeles-area viewers with access to digital cable, ABC News is also offering extended convention coverage, anchored in the evening by Peter Jennings. The service, “ABC News Now,” is also available on broadband.

Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Univision will report from the RNC, and both will carry the president’s Thursday acceptance speech live.

Many radio talk show hosts are broadcasting from the convention this week (including KABC-AM’s Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Larry Elder), as is National Public Radio, which plans full coverage of the evening proceedings.