TV ought to abolish "Election Night"

Vox

From network and cable news to Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah's late-night specials, Election Night television was in an anxiety-induced holding pattern because of all the uncertainty. "In 2020, the fact that results were going to be delayed — something that all of America had been conditioned to expect — didn’t really matter," says Emily VanDerWerff. "The show had to go on because that’s what shows like this do. TV abhors a vacuum, but the 2020 election, especially, occurred in a vacuum. Even once all of the votes are counted, the urge to fill hours and hours of airtime on election night and beyond will linger with viewers who thought they needed information and instead got a steady dose of anxiety. This week’s nonstop coverage of the vote count has only served to underscore that election TV — both in late-night and on cable news — has long been broken. Maybe it should go away forever. For weeks now, Americans have known one thing about the 2020 election: We probably wouldn’t know official results for days or even weeks after Election Day because holding an election in a pandemic means lots of votes arriving via mail, and some states wouldn’t count mail-in ballots until polls had closed. But even if that simple likelihood hadn’t been discussed over and over and over again by politicians and pundits (here’s Bernie Sanders talking about it), a quick glance at recent history could have guided our expectations regarding when we’d find out who won. Of the five presidential elections of the 21st century before the 2020 election, only two — 2008 and 2012 — were called before midnight on the East Coast, and the 2000 election dragged on for over a month. Even extremely recent history — which is to say, the 2018 midterms — took weeks to fully understand, particularly when it came to the extent of Democratic gains in the House." VanDerWerff adds: "To watch TV coverage on election night — not to mention social media reactions to said TV coverage — was to watch a full-blown meltdown over the fact that nobody really knew anything yet, something that continued to play out across Wednesday and Thursday as all involved waited for official vote counts...The 'just keep talking until we know something' approach underserves viewers and creates endless amounts of anxiety. One of the biggest flaws of 24/7 cable news coverage in this moment is that it largely obscures the actual story of the election. And all week long, it has poked at what basically everybody knew would be the story going in. Counting the votes would take a while. We wouldn’t have results for a few days. But the demand for more, more, more led to a long election night and then, after the election, long days of single tea leaves being extrapolated into an entire plant without much thought given to how that approach might sway public opinion or how it might fail viewers."

ALSO:

• Viewers are frustrated TV news organizations are hesitant to declare a winner: On Friday night, TV news organizations were criticized for not calling Joe Biden the winner, even though networks have A-list anchors standing by in anticipation of the historic moment. On CNN, John King particularly incensed viewers when he said: “You have to do it in any event because credibility is everything, especially in those times when you have the President of the United States himself challenging what’s happening. Other people have a stake in this…you should have basic standards. The rules are the rules, no matter what. In this case, calling (Pennsylvania) would make Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States, and so you take extra, extra, extra care.”
• Fox News is hitting a dangerous new low by choosing to mislead viewers about the state of the election: "Fox News, which spent years flattering Donald Trump and his fictions, is finishing what it started," says Megan Garber. "The network that first helped bring Trump to political power is now working—despite a fair election that seems poised, as of this writing, to be won by his opponent—to keep him there. Fox’s popular prime-time opinion programs, throughout this week, have functioned as a Trump-campaign ad by another means. But (Thursday) night’s shows reached a dangerous new low. The Fox News Channel, this week, had the opportunity to reckon with reality; instead, the network chose to mislead its viewers about the state of the election, and to foment mistrust in the workings of the American electoral system more broadly. It chose the fate of Donald Trump—and the ratings that come from the viewers who love him—over the fate of American democracy."
• President Trump reportedly wants to "destroy" Fox News and steal Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson over its coverage of Election Week
• Laura Ingraham has begun preparing her Fox News viewers for a Trump loss
• John King attributes working out and pandemic coverage for helping him make it through long hours on TV
• Trump's appeal with white women can be explained via Meghan McCain
• Pennsylvania's attorney general reacts after his teenage son crashes his MSNBC interview
• Steve Kornacki became the internet's crush this week -- read his 2011 coming out essay he wrote for Salon
• CNN keeps playing Melissa McCarthy screaming “PEOPLE ARE WORTH SAVING!” to promote the HBO Max movie Superintelligence
• CNN was No. 1 again on Thursday night