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CNN's presidential election coverage was "unnecessarily torturous" -- like being dipped in boiling oil

  • "Several of the closest, most significant battleground states are still counting votes, and it could take a long time to have a result," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "And yet in spite of this completely inevitable moment of limbo, experiencing it in real time last night on CNN felt like being slowly flayed alive, or perhaps buried under a suffocating pile of county maps, each of them stalled at 82 percent returned. There’s a sense of inevitability about that, too — a sense that of course there would be this excruciating tick-tock as the polls gradually close, of course the only way CNN could’ve covered this is to stand in front of a giant magic map and watch breathlessly as states go from blue to red and back again. But the specific programming choices on CNN last night exacerbated it all. Some of those decisions were typical for CNN’s usual election coverage; some of them were clearly made with the particularities of last night in mind. Together, they created an Election Night experience that was strangely intimate and unnecessarily torturous. There are three ways to think about the issues with CNN’s election coverage, a.k.a. its thumbscrew in the form of a newscast: the basics, the details, and the timeline. The biggest choice CNN made between 7 p.m. and midnight last night was arguably defensible: It became the John King Magic Board show, an hours-long stretch of nearly unbroken closeups of John King’s upper body as he stood in front of his large touchscreen map, zooming in and out of states and counties, flipping back and forth between 2016 and 2020 results, again and again circling Miami-Dade County and drawing two roughly parallel lines between Pennsylvania and Minnesota. This is fundamental Election Night coverage stuff, especially for cable news. Fox and MSNBC have their own versions of the Magic Board Man (Bill Hemmer and Steve Kornacki, respectively). John King and his giant map were as certain to be major figures on CNN last night as the sun was to rise in the morning. But it matters how you deploy the Magic Board. On the other big cable channels, Steve Kornacki and Bill Hemmer were frequent but not constant figures. The overall coverage was more of a mixture, balancing that obsessive map-based focus with voices from panelists who could occasionally hop on to say things like 'and remember, most of the early vote hasn’t been counted yet,' or, 'this is exactly what we expected to happen.' The trouble with CNN’s version, with its breathless laser focus on John King and his very underwhelming sidekick Wolf Blitzer, is that King could say 'we lack context' until the cows came home, and he’d still be standing in front of a giant map colored with stark reds and blues. The words and the imagery did not match. Even worse, King stood in front of that board and repeatedly declared the election to be 'interesting,' 'exciting,' and — several times — 'fun.' The intense dissonance between King’s happy good times in front of the board and the viewer-side sensation of having one’s skin be slowly peeled off is gross enough on its surface. But it gets more upsetting when you step back and consider that King’s fun is coming because of how incomplete the results are."

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    TOPICS: John King, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, Anderson Cooper, Gayle King, Joe Biden, Joy Reid, Steve Kornacki, 2020 Presidential Election, Cable News, Ratings, Trump Presidency