Trump Election TV: A Nightmare to Watch

Steve Kornacki and I need to stop meeting like this.

A TV crush is supposed to make your heart pound because you’re nervous how much you faint. Not because you fear that every move he makes in front of this high-tech electoral map will determine whether or not democracy and civilization as we know it will continue to exist.

And yet, here I was, like every election campaign, biting my fingernails until I bled, picking at my Khaki King, and watching the presidential election results come in. This year I invited some guest stars to the fear party. (Sorry, Steve: we’re “open,” right?) Rachel Maddow, Bret Baier, David Muir, Savannah Guthrie…I’m sorry you all got into this mess, but I suspect you knew this was going to happen.

There is no television that is as pointless, produced with as much blank stare, or provokes as little conversation as the coverage of election night in 2024.

From 4 p.m. ET until the end of the night, I watched so many networks’ coverage that I thought I’d make up acronyms. I had to whisper the most disturbing four words in the world into my phone: “Download the Fox News app.” So I did. It was surprisingly boring.

There is a wild dissonance between the frustration with the situation in our country and the way it is portrayed in the media, as if it were commonplace or normal. This is my biggest takeaway from election night: We have to expect that this big event will change our lives. But the reporting on it, in my view, followed such a draft of elections four, eight or twelve years ago. If you told me that what I was watching was footage from 2016, let alone 2020, I would believe you.

I started the evening with NBC.

Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt showed footage of the long lines across the country with a countdown clock to the end of the polls. It solidified what would become a constant annoyance throughout the night: knowing nothing isn’t interesting; No matter what channel you watch, who your star is and what resources are available.

I tuned in to Brian Williams Amazon experiment. The streaming special was aimed at young voters – I guess the mystery voters who think, “There’s an election coming up, I have to find the complicated way to access a Brian Willaims redemption special on a streaming platform.” .” They are reportedly still arguing with their Rokus.

After turning it on, I can report that the dazzling LED screen that forms Williams’ background is impressive, and based on these vivid images, I have no idea what character he is playing in it Evil Movie, but I’m assuming it’s a big movie.

Williams’ graphics department seemed similarly confused. Several times he called a state for Harris or Trump, but the wrong state was shown on the television screen. When I tuned back in later that evening, Williams was reading the results on his iPhone, the camera trained on him and the LED background screen glowing behind him.

I have no ill will towards experts. Especially on election day. It must be tiring. Kudos to every expert who said it all over the course of the six or seven hours I spent watching the results across all channels. The socket doesn’t matter. It was the same monologue on every channel. “Well, we have statistics that say people are voting for Harris, and we also have statistics that say they are voting for Trump.”

Somewhere on three different channels I heard a comparison between the cost of eggs and the right to abortion.

My poor pillow has done its job; there has already been enough shouting.

That evening of watching so much campaign television led me to a big question: Why do we torture ourselves with this exercise?

Have you ever walked into a restaurant and obviously everyone knows each other and they sing an unfamiliar song but everyone likes it? You start crying because it’s so moving, and yet you think, “Whaaaaaat…did I just walk in on that?” Well, around 9:30 p.m. ET. I turned on Fox News. That’s the way it is.

I watched NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Amazon Prime and Fox News with a critical eye on election night, trying to figure out what “good” election television was. My conclusion: Nobody knows. Those TV shows were terrible.

My hour of watching Fox News felt like a lobotomy, and I don’t mean that in the “didn’t give it a chance” sense. I had previously seen Maddow and Muir and other shows that focused on politics and statistics. When Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum appeared on my screen, they rightly had nothing to say about the election. They just started barking. At this point, no matter how many LED walls you throw at them, no one has anything interesting to say.

You know how fun and not at all annoying it was to go to brunch with your friends and hear the question, “What do you think of the election?” Well, when you consider the millions of dollars the networks spent on wall-to-wall coverage with no one saying anything more insightful than your friend Ashley, then you have an idea of ​​what the coverage looked like in the evening hours of election night 2024.

For most of the day, each station was a very dramatic hamster wheel, assuming the hamster you brought home in elementary school and accidentally killed had suffered incredible damage in the process. There was a real push for drama: At around 6:45 p.m. ET, CNN played music so dramatic it did law and order I would be embarrassed. I prepared myself for catastrophic news. No, instead Anderson accused Cooper of anchoring an exit poll about whether or not people “like” Kamala Harris.

We watch these things so closely because we are trained to do so, but also because we need the comfort. I don’t know how much Amazon’s wild LED screen cost, but I know it should have made me more excited about the technology than I am. It’s gratifying when a project can be isolated because it’s broadcast on one platform or only seen on another. But I think there’s something different about election coverage, which has been more accessible this year than ever before.

I think we resort to the fact that some of the coverage is blocked or not easily accessible for reassurance: who knows what’s going on, but I can’t respond because I can’t see it. But we don’t live in a world where things are isolated or fenced in or not part of a narrative. These last 1,000 words all contribute to a future. My edit will do the same.