And a Week of Watching
The agony of cable news (Kornacki notwithstanding).
at least one thing remained consistent through Election Week’s sea of unknowns: Watching everything unfold in real time on cable news felt like being slowly flayed alive, or perhaps buried under a suffocating pile of county maps, each of them stalled at 82 percent returned. For months, we had been warned that there would be no clear winner on Tuesday night and that the tallying would likely stretch for days or even weeks. Yet despite this anticipated limbo, the time we spent glued to the news was much like being stretched on a rack, with each new tranche of ballots providing one more opportunity for agony.
The worst was CNN on Tuesday night. From 7 p.m. until midnight, it was an unending marathon of the John King Magic Board Show—an hours-long stream of the anchor’s upper body in front of his large touchscreen map, zooming in and out of states and counties, flipping back and forth between 2016 and 2020 results, again and again circling MiamiDade County and drawing parallel lines to connect Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Fox and MSNBC had their own versions of the Magic Board Man (Bill Hemmer and Steve Kornacki, respectively), who balanced that obsessive map-based focus with voice-of-reason panelists, who occasionally hopped on to say things like, “And remember, most of the early vote hasn’t been counted yet.” But back on CNN, the board was color-coded in red and blue, leaving the visual impression that decisions had already been made. A board with states left uncolored would have conveyed, correctly, that there was still lots of uncertainty. But CNN decided that flipping back and forth from red to blue made for more exciting television. (First Biden’s ahead! Then Trump! Can Biden squeak it out?!)
Even worse, King stood in front of that board and repeatedly declared the election to be “interesting” and “exciting” and—several times—“fun.” The intense dissonance between his happy good times and the viewer-side sensation of having our skin slowly peeled off was gross enough on its surface, but it got more upsetting when you realized that King’s fun was due to how incomplete the results were. It’s just super-jolly to watch the map change a thousand times and speculate about which version will prevail. Who knows?! It’s a gas!
The MSNBC approach was leavened by the presence of Kornacki, who seemed to understand, as is the case in most of life, that being repeatedly told something is fun tends to have the reverse effect. Kornacki instead presented the election as a forbidding and gradually unfolding puzzle, which tends to be more effective at piquing viewer interest. Indeed, by Wednesday morning, there was evidence of not just Kornacki appreciation but outright Kornacki thirst. (It didn’t hurt that MSNBC’s dedicated Kornacki Cam occasionally focused on his pert rear end, a bright spot in the weeklong slog.)
As broadcasters adjusted to the reality of the slow-rolling ballot totals, they modified their coverage to what would obviously be a marathon. King, Kornacki, and the Magic Boards became frequent features rather than immovable cornerstones of the coverage. And as the week went on, cable news became more of a tussle between the channels. The most remarkable schism took place on Thursday night, when MSNBC and the broadcast networks cut away from Donald Trump’s criminally false press conference while Fox and CNN continued to carry it. Outrage from the MSNBC anchors about the president’s lies felt well earned but
also shockingly late in the game. Now they learn how to mute him?
On Friday morning, Fox clung to various futile possibilities for Trump. Trying desperately to keep some hope alive for the president, Hemmer stood in front of his map and fiddled with what might happen if Trump could somehow take the lead in Arizona. The map software wouldn’t let him. “It’s locking me out,” he said. “It’s locked because we called it,” Bret Baier responded.
A few brief high points aside, the unhurried march of vote counting combined with the unblinking network coverage meant the agony of the week was dilated rather than diluted. The tone was set by that first night of anchors desperately grasping for some narrative arc. There was none; there couldn’t be at that early stage. Still, the nonstop energy of cable news made you feel as if you were watching something happen, even if it was just watching a pot boil while also feeling like the lobster in that pot. Early on Tuesday night, King stood in front of a map filled in with far-too-early results. Texas and Florida were briefly blue. “Take a picture,” he urged viewers, “because it won’t stay this way.” He meant it as a helpful reminder, but the implication was as baffling as every other moment from the entire evening. Who on earth would want a keepsake?