The networks are filling the airways with chaff, treating tiny developments like a major news. They should just tell us there’s nothing to see right now, and move on.
People watch a projection on the side of a building as poll reports begin to roll in on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020 in Washington, D.C. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images
By JACK SHAFER, Politico’s senior media writer
As Election Day 2020 coasted to a crawl and the West Coast voting precincts closed shop, the cable news networks were dazed to learn that even though the pollsters had predicted a flush, green, blossoming victory for Joe Biden, the presidential contest insisted on worming its way into the early a.m. hours, into the next morning, and maybe even beyond, pushing it into the sort of overtime periods and extra innings one associates with a sports event that refuses to end.
Surely the networks were prepared for such a contingency? But no, around the dial on Wednesday morning, the anchors and correspondents filled the air with journalistic chaff, noting incremental changes in vote totals in the contested states as new ballots were counted as if that were real news. It was enough to make the average viewer pray that the commissioner of baseball would take over the networks and decree that in the case of a tight election whose count threatens to go on forever, each candidate could place a metaphorical man on second at the beginning of their extra half-inning in hopes of hastening victory for one or the other.
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But no such intervention has occurred. As I write Wednesday, the three major cable networks continue to cover the no-news of the protracted count. But instead of honestly conceding that there’s not much to report and won’t be for hours or even longer, they’re attempted to sustain a permanent state of excitement, fluffing their viewers with fancy finger-work on their big boards, zooming in to individual counties in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, zooming out, tapping the various in-play states on the map to create competing scenarios in which Biden or Donald Trump crest the 270 summit. Everybody in TV news is guilty of this crime, but nobody has a bigger rap sheet than CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who can shout himself into a panic whenever a single county’s vote count inches upward.
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