Posted on 11/08/2002 2:18:19 PM PST by Apolitical
It was the first Tuesday in November, and the nation was glued to its television screens. All across the land, eager viewers watched, hoping to catch part of a gloating victory speech or maybe a quick cutaway to a loser's disappointed face. It was the day the country had long been awaiting, and no one could yet tell who would emerge victorious. It was ("drum roll please") the awarding of the Giller Prize for fiction!
Yes, that was the big news here in Canada Tuesday night. In its typical self-absorbed fashion, Canada was paying more attention to an obscure Canuck literary award than to the significant midterm elections taking place south of the border. Never mind that there were consequential decisions, such as which party would control the United States Senate, being made -- Canadian newscasters could not stop burbling on about the surprise victory of an unfortunately titled novel called The Polished Hoe.
That's how I ended up watching the elections on CNN.
Now, if I had had my druthers, I would have watched my coverage on Fox News. However, the meddling Canadian government has decreed that Canadians may not legally access content such as Fox News via cable or satellite. You see, doing so would allow Canadians to watch American stuff they are actually interested in rather than Canadian crap they don't want to see but that the government thinks the should watch, like coverage of the Giller Prize gala. But this is another column for another week, fair readers. The point is that Fox News was not an option for me Tuesday.
So, my viewing companions (fellow members of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy) and I turned reluctantly to CNN to watch what we hoped would be a Republican dominated night. We soon realized, however, that with no exit polls available and a cast of incompetent anchors before us, our attention was quickly going to be drawn to matters other than the election results. Within minutes, my own mind was flooded with politically irrelevant questions. Is Judy Woodruff anorexic? Is Bill Hemmer a super hero's alter ego? Why can't anyone read the graphs? Does Paula Zahn have lockjaw, or is that just the way she talks? Why can't Aaron Brown formulate a sentence? And what happened to his hair? Is Bob Novak a left-wing conspiracy? What time does The Sopranos start?
As the night wore on, my viewing companions and I started paying more and more attention to the results filtering in on our laptop and less and less attention to the inane coverage on our television. The degree of our inattention became particularly apparent when one of us glanced up at the television and pointed out a photo captioned "John Sununu." "He's lost a lot of weight," my boyfriend said. "He's got more hair," my friend Chris said. "He's looking really good," I said in awe. Then, Papa Sununu came on, looking portly and thin haired as ever, at which point we all opened our mouths and said "ohhhh." We had completely forgotten about John Sununu, Jr., and his close race for a New Hampshire senate seat. And our scattered television hosts, busy misinterpreting their own charts and diagrams (one half expected a befuddled Judy Woodruff to exclaim, as talking Barbie did a few years back, "Math is hard!"), had done nothing to remind us. When it came to keeping track of the important races, we CNN viewers were on our own.
That is not to say that there were no benefits to watching the election results on CNN. There was a certain comic touch to the way the network cut to both victory and concession speeches only long enough to let the candidates hush up their crowds. Once the candidates started talking, CNN would cut away, as though to spare its viewers' preciously weak attention spans.
And there was some just plain weird election night stuff, too, that could only be captured on television. Like when the folks at Elizabeth Dole's camp in North Carolina blasted Eye of the Tiger for the victorious new Senator's entrance. Exactly which genius thought the Rocky theme song would be a good fit for a sixty something woman named Liddy who sports big hair and Technicolor suits, I don't know, but maybe whoever it was should have kept the song playing longer so we could have been spared Liddy's inane anecdote about running into her sister in-law Bunny while campaigning. (Strangely, Dole's was one of the few speeches CNN saw fit not to cut away from immediately.)
In the end, though, the biggest problem for me with watching Tuesday's election was that the most exciting stuff happened either really late or at an inopportune moment of my viewing.....................
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanenterprise.org ...
But as soon as the results were in, far superior analysis could, and can, be found on FoxNews.
The only Canadian I have ever personally met who was as much of a dolt as Peter Jennings was a cabbbie. I think Peter may have missed his calling.
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