Is it soup yet?
I have had a great deal of fun the last 10 years ignoring television news.. As a career newspaperman, print journalism is the only real journalism to me. TV “newspeople” tend too much toward being male models and female pageant contestants. It annoys me just to see them.
I stopped watching the “Film at 11” local news shows in 1994 after watching 30 minutes at home in Los Angeles and seeing no news that wasn’t scandal, crime, car chases or the entertainment industry, I decided I had seen enough local news to last me a lifetime.
I didn’t watch much election coverage in 2012 or 2016, mostly because I didn’t expect there to be a lot of drama either time. Of course it was the unexpected drama four years ago that compelled me to watch this time. Between yesterday and today, I’ve watched at least a dozen hours of CNN.
It gets awfully tiring.
One problem with TV news is that it’s all about repetition. For the most part, they believe their audience is only with them for 45-60 minutes at a time. So if you watch for an evening, you’re going to see the same talking heads making the same points over and over again.
That can be good or bad depending on who they are. I always liked Katie Couric, and I could spend hours watching my college friend Susan Rook on CNN back in the ’80s. On the other hand, talking heads like Laura Ingraham and Michelle Malkin are like. fingernails on a chalkboard.
Anyway, I’ve been watching this year. I did go to bed by midnight last night. Seventy has its limits.
This was without question the most bewildering election night I’ve had in more than 50 years. Most of the problems came from the most massive early voting in American history. Different states treated the early votes differently, with some reporting them first and others reporting them last.
So I looked at Republican Ohio and was shocked to see Joe Biden ahead by 300,000 votes. Then I had to watch for hours as the lead slipped away and Donald Trump won the state by more than 450,000 votes. Other Republican states that followed the same pattern were Florida, Texas and on a lesser scale North Carolina.
My former home state of Virginia has had an infuriating pattern in recent years, with Republicans breaking out to huge leads and Democrats coming back in the wee hours. This time it looked horrific, with Trump ahead at one point by 350,000 votes. My friend Lisa Pellegrin told me Democrat areas were late to report and it would be all right.
As she has been so often over the years, she was right. Biden carried Virginia by more than 400,000 votes.
As I write this, we’re around sundown on Wednesday and Biden almost has victory in his grasp.
It isn’t soup yet.
But it’s close.