Election Night Coverage

The coverage of the Presidential election, was just how I had predicted: everywhere.  It seemed as though every website I went to and every television station I turned to (news related or not) had something about the election on it.  The major network tv stations were as always, repetitive yet thorough.  However, I must say I was fairly disappointed in some of the cable news programs.  CNN broadcasted the first hologram on television with news reporter Jessica Yellin.  Here is the video:

The guy news reporter repeats 3 times that this is the first time that this has ever been done on television and that we should watch carefully and how exciting this is blah blah blah.  The focus of this report was way more on how neat it is that there is a news reporter standing with him through a hologram, than it was on the election.  It’s election night!  Was then really the appropriate time to introduce this new type of technology to television?  I really just thought it was inappropriate to take the focus away from the election and to put it on holograms instead.  CNN.com also had the video up on it’s web page definitely distracting from what was truly important that night.

The WashingtonPost.com, CNN.com, and NYPost.com all offered a large amount of articles pertaining to the Presidential election.  However, on all the websites, as I clicked through the various articles, I noticed just how repetitive and redundant they all are.  I think that it was possible to have just a few articles about the election containing all the information that those 15 articles did, just without being so repetitive.  If you are looking for a basically strict democratic site, anyone of these will do.  I find it frustrating that these are major sites for important news sources, and they don’t even have the professionalism to be more neutral.  I can understand a blog or editorial piece being biased, but I think it is so ridiculous how easy it is to go to one of these sites and find a clearly pro-Obama article.

I would honestly rather watch the television for my election coverage than check websites or several reasons.  First of all, the coverage on tv is live and is constantly being updated every second as soon as information is received.  Websites on the other hand, take time to update, and even though they all pronounced Obama the winner shortly after it was announced, the tv coverage was capable of telling us right away as soon as it is known.  Because I have the attention span of five year old, it is also more appealing for me to be able to watch people cover it and for them to talk to me rather than me having to search for the information I am trying to find and then have to read through it.  It may sound like I am lazy, but no matter how the election standings were going, I definitely found it more enjoyable to lounge on my bed and watch the tv than sit at my desk and browse through websites.  The television coverage is also able to broadcast the acceptance speech and the music and celebrations leading up to it, whereas websites are unable to show the viewer such things.  For those rooting for Obama, I find that it must have been much more exciting to be watching the triumph on tv then attempting to follow it online.

I personally watched Fox News, probably like every other Republican in the United States.  Although I find that the way they covered it was quite boring, it was better than the reporters pretty much smiling and celebrating on tv with every news they received about Obama possibly being proclaimed the winner.  Fox News is clearly conservative, but I thought they had toned down the biasness a bit than what they are usually like on a daily basis and their coverage on the weeks leading up to the election, which definitely surprised me.

Overall, the coverage of the Presidential election was just what I had expected.  I am really not that into politics, and the coverage didn’t push me to become more into it, so I can’t say that I was impressed with anything; it was just the normal.