Election night 'whenever - this complaint needs a thread

Its about TV "news" coverage of politics, and of election night in particular.

I read this introduction to an article about races to watch tonight, and when reading it I wanted to shout, YES YES YES F*CKIN HELL YES!

Here it is:



YES! Gawd-darnit.

It's outrageous, if you think about it, and such an utter waste of time for everyone. And a disservice to the quality of political debate as well.

I remember the night of the British elections earlier this year. I could get CNN on my TV, but not BBC - and I didnt have internet access at home yet.

It (CNN) was utterly effin' useless (I can only imagine how much worse still Fox is).

It was all but impossible to actually find out about any actual results. They just werent interested. Not in who was getting how many votes, which MP had retained or lost his seat, what percentages the parties were getting, even less how the trend of the incoming numbers so far stacked up against those of last time.

I've never missed Peter Snow and his endlessly inventive gadgets, maps and interactive charts (once, as I remember it, he recreated the Iraq desert as a kind of sandbox in the BBC Newsnight studio, to "enact" the various strategic positions and developments for us) so much in my life.

Instead, all bleeding night they had nothing but talking heads. With sweepingly general or inanely superficial bromides. Telling us nothing that we didnt already know and hadnt already been said on the talkshows the day before. Countering each others prefab talking points (look how balanced we are, we have one blatherer of vacuousness from the left, and one from the right).

I found myself cursing the television. In-f*cking-ane.

And it's sacrilege! Election night is a ritual. The whole suspense and excitement of election night - a once a two- or four year event, after all, the culmination of months of campaigning by thousands of pavement-pounding activists - is about the tense awaiting of election results. Did my guy make it, or not? About the show and spectacle of candidates addressing the public, their victory speeches or declarations of defeat (which politically aware Englishman doesnt remember the moment Michael Portillo's - losing - result came in, in 1997?). It's about the anxious tabulating of incoming results, trying to make sense out of them, comparing them with results from the same places last time to identify trends. What's the swing? BBC's Peter Snow would show it with his swing-o-meter.

Instead, what we get is the laziest of television. It wont be any different tonight.

Round up some of the usual pundits who always have a few too many spare opinions, and let them spout their commonplaces and speculations.

Intersperse with excited, and lengthy, commercials hyping your own station. "The news, right now!" Yeah, except you're not actually showing any of it - not the actual results..

Instead, you spend the night allowing political hacks to serve their vacuous but toxic mix of infotainment and agitprop, talking up their side, down the other's side, and none of it makes us any wiser - provides any actual facts - the only ones who benefit are the passionate partisans waiting for their cues about what the talking points for their side are.

I'm sorry, but US election coverage on TV sucks big fat donkey dick (to use one of A's favourite expressions).

Whats more - Dutch election coverage is also heading that way. Ever more blather. People telling us what to think about the results, while hardly even showing them anymore (with a bit of luck, the important ones might show up on the ticker).

I dont know how BBC World is - I dont think its as good as the domestic BBC - but when it comes to preserving the magic of election night and feeding us all the info we could possibly need, everyone at BBC2 will be receiving their ticket into heaven for that alone. And we'll be missing it, again, tonight.

OK.

There.

Thought I'd get this rant out of the way already now.

And long live the Internet.

You may laugh or smile at me now.