Gone are the days of competent election coverage
What a difference 20 years makes.
At the turn of this century and for decades earlier, a column appearing the day before an intensely fought and highly significant political primary would lead with a story about where reporters from each local news station would be deployed on Election Night and how extensive overall live coverage would be.
Regular programming would be cancelled so Channels 3, 6, 10, and 29 could go wall-to-wall announcing voting results as they came in, interviewing candidates about impending victory or defeat, and conducting interviews with voters or members of key voting blocks to give a sense of public opinion.
Those days are gone. Election results will most likely be provided by a crawl at the bottom of the screen or by anchor cutins amid commercials or in lieu of bumpers (short bits that separate one segment of a program or two programs from each other).
That is if incoming results are tracked at all. Stations today may wait until their 10 or 11 p.m. newscasts to give a general overview of what’s happening in the race for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination where three candidates, Kathy Barnette, Dave McCormick, and Mehmet Oz are running neck-to-neck-to-neck. The GOP gubernatorial primary offers equal suspense and tension.
Democrats may also have news. At a dinner tonight, before I wrote this column, Dems were arguing the merits of Senate hopefuls John Fetterman and Conor Lamb, and one person was berating another for mailing in a ballot for Lamb based on what she (and I) considered to be faulty information.
I miss the fray once made more exciting by television coverage. In earlier times, my day today would have been spent on the telephone with representatives from the separate stations to make sure all their coverage arrangements were accurate and to negotiate whether I could talk to a reporter in the field if he or she broke a juicy story.
The irony in being nostalgic for this level of action is 20 years ago, I was bemoaning that politics is covered so sparsely and uninterestingly on television. I remember writing columns saying TV news folk find the subject dry and don’t have a technique for delving into it in the detail they should.
In 2022, I rail about the opposite circumstance, that politics is covered too widely and badly.
In the effort to make politics exciting, news organizations, primarily cable and streaming outlets rather than traditional stations, tear into it 24 hours a day, but not in a way that is journalistically sound or helpful.
The constant political barrage has become the occasion for shouting matches between partisan commentators who don’t worry about truth, accuracy, fairness, balance, or justice in their declarations as long as they are persuading viewers to believe and lean a certain way.
Anchors are worse because they feed into or egg on the commentators, pandering even more egregiously than their guests to make sure their audience of now-trained partisans receives information that reinforces the point of view their network espouses, lunatic conservatism on Fox News Channel or lunatic progressivism on MSNBC or CNN.
If anything worthwhile is spouted on Fox, MSNBC, or CNN, it usually comes from a reporter who has enough “old school” in him or her (or them?) to emulate “Dragnet’s” Joe Friday and deliver the facts, ma’am, just the facts.
So I miss the comprehensive Election Night coverage of the past while being grateful I won’t be subjected to commentators analyzing results, probably with a partisan tone but can simply check returns on the Real Clear Politics website or by taking a quarter-hourly peek at my phone.
Speaking of my phone, one thing I won’t miss after tomorrow night is the avalanche of texts I’m receiving, especially now that Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick are working so hard to neutralize their surging rival, Kathy Barnette.
Naturally, I take anything I receive from any candidate with cynicism and a shrug. Pieces I’ve seen from a Lancaster reporter, WGAL’s Matt Barcaro, show the danger of taking candidates’ ads at face value. Barcaro has been doing a good job checking those ads and reporting his findings without being partisan.
I give Kathy Barnette credit for answering her rivals quickly when they send out videos of her saying potentially objectionable things. I was miffed at Barnette because of a message issued by the Oz campaign that depicted her denigrating one of my personal heroes, George Washington.
Oz torpedoists made it look as if Barnette was insulting the first president and denying his role in forming the United States. The 15-second byte they distributed
by phone text had her sneering while standing at Washington’s home, Mt. Vernon, and talking about other visitors referring to our country’s father as “some highfallutin’ hero.”
Barnette countered wisely. She issued a YouTube showing the complete video in which the seemingly sneering utterances appeared. Watching her entire presentation, it’s clear she is not disparaging Washington but making an intelligent case for looking at history from a balanced point of view that accounts for both Washington’s accomplishments and his lifetime status as a slave owner.
(Full disclosure: I have no dog in this hunt. I will vote in the Republican primary — I only vote in person. — but it is not my intention to favor or endorse one candidate over another here.)
If I can access WGAL, Barcaro is the one I want to watch tomorrow night.
Stories from Jodi Long
Jodi Long comes from a family of vaudevillians who appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other variety series of that era. Long herself made her initial Broadway appearance at age 7 opposite Tom Bosley, Martin Balsam, and Dorothy Loudon, in a flop, Nowhere to Go But Up, that tried out in Philadelphia.
Stories abound from Jodi’s now long career and that of her parents, Larry and Trudie Leung.
“About 20 years ago, I created a diary in which I began to write down all of the stories so they wouldn’t be lost,” Long said by telephone from her New York home.
“As I assembled these stories, I saw how they would work in a play,” Long continued.
That play was supposed to open at Bucks County Playhouse the year COVID shut down theaters. Under a new title, “American Jade,” Long’s piece debuts at the New Hope theater Friday for a three-week run.
“The show has evolved a lot since I began working it. It even has a new title from when it was supposed to open in New
Hope. Then I called it ‘Surfing My DNA.’
“’American Jade’ covers a lot of ground. I deal with the emotional imprint of my parents, the imprint of society, and the imprint of show business. In addition to performing since I was a child, I grew up backstage at the clubs my parents played on what was then called ‘The Chop Suey circuit.’”
Long also talks about her own extensive career, which includes a Broadway run in “Flower Drum Song,” a major television role as Steve Byrne’s mother on the series “Sullivan & Son,” and her Emmy-winning performance in the series “Dash and Lily.”
“That series only lasted one season, “Long says. “I almost forgot about it when I was notified about my Emmy nomination. I was shocked when I won. I was told I was the first Asian-American to receive an Emmy for acting.
“I checked because I swore and was right that Archie Panjabi was given an Emmy for ‘The Good Wife.’ The Emmy officials said, ‘Yes, but she is British, and some other Asian winners are from Asia. You are the first Asian-American.’ Why argue further?”
Another Philadelphia appearance was in Philip Glass’s “1000 Airplanes on the Roof” in a part written originally for a man.
“I auditioned and impressed enough to get the part. It was amazing because I traveled all over the world with it and was able to visit family in Australia, where my father grew up, and China.
“I was in Hong Kong on another job, a Mike Newell film, when a woman asked me if I wanted to go the mainland, to China, which I thought of as forbidden. She spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese, so I was able to have an adventure few tourists can. With our looks and my friend’s ability to communicate in Chinese, we were able to slip away from the people who watch all foreigners and go places and see areas closed to most visitors.
“The most important part of our wandering on our own is for the first time in my life, I got a clear sense of what China and being Chinese are. It helped understand a lot.
As Long speaks, you hear the contents of a play in her experiences, including work with Margaret Cho and being in an Asian cast of a dramatized novel, the movie version of which starred Ingrid Bergman.