"It was bizarre and off-putting (Tuesday) night — after the strangeness of the last four years and 2020 in particular and this election season most of all — to see newscasters treat this like the usual horse race," says Inkoo Kang. "I’ll be honest: Election nights tend to bring out the worst in TV news, which is why I avoid day-of television coverage as much as I can. What I saw last night was pretty much what we see every four years: data that doesn’t quite translate to information ('With 3 percent of precincts reporting, the count is …'), pointless hypothetical scenarios and time-filling pantomimes of authority interspersed with the omnipresent phrase 'too early to call.' Perhaps there’s someone out there who was comforted by this show of 'normalcy,' but it just recalled for me the first two years of the Trump presidency, when the mainstream news institutions took way too long to adjust to the stream of lies and media manipulation coming out of the White House. The cognitive dissonance of being told for weeks that we shouldn’t expect results on Election Day and watching these journalists largely ignore or sidestep that reality was too much. The networks’ usual numbers-only treatment also repelled me because it projected a lack of stakes, as if Biden v. Trump was just another sports match and not a deciding factor in the future of American democracy. All the talk of 'This random county is like this' and 'This group could be key to x’s victory in y' conveyed a weightlessness to the election that no one I know feels. Of course, election night coverage isn’t traditionally analytical or editorial about the issues, but there must be some sort of happy medium between substance and the horse race."
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TOPICS: 2020 Presidential Election, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, Joe Biden, ABC News, Cable News, CBS News, NBC News, Trump Presidency