Okay, America. It's your turn to choose. Tonight, after you've chosen between John and George at the polling both, you'll have another decision to make with your remote control. Who's it going to be? Tom, Peter or Dan?
Maybe you'll branch out and pick the more eccentric names, Brit or Wolf. There's boring old Jim, who won't be interrupted by commercials, and the popular kid in class, the feisty and funny Jon. Regardless of who you choose, the biggest question after "Who won?" will be "How will the news cover this election?"
Election Night 2000 was a black eye for every news network, as each anchor and election team hastily declared Florida's electoral votes for Gore, then changed their minds and declared it for Bush, then changed their minds, threw up their hands and gave up. Such a media disaster is highly unlikely again, as news desks have changed the way in which they call elections.
But that doesn't mean that the night will be without high drama. Each network will have their own life-size version of the Red and Blue map, fancy graphics and an official "sidekick" correspondent - including Sam Donaldson of ABC, Bob Scheiffer of CBS and Tim Russert of NBC. Russert gained widespread adulation in 2000 for using the low-tech whiteboard to explain to viewers the way the election was breaking down. I'd expect the other networks to copy his example. Here's one vote to see Charlie Gibson pull out his Etch-a-Sketch to diagram which candidate will take Ohio.
Tonight's election coverage will hopefully signal the end of a campaign in which television, as a media form, has been beaten, abused and stripped of its dignity. Each candidate and his respective party have used the Big Three networks and the cable news channels when it was convenient, but have ridiculed the news outlets when the tide was turned against them. From convention coverage to advertising, the story of Election 2004 can easily be seen via the battles of television.
Howard Dean was the media's favorite until he began to get irritable with reporters and lose some of his thunder. Then the news networks overplayed the "I have a scream" speech, which was his eventual downfall. It wasn't until days later, when the speech had become a part of Americana, that these same stations apologized for their journalistic lapses. When Dean's speech was played against the roaring crowd at his rally, you could barely hear the man; it was because of the way he was miked that Dean appeared to lose his senses. Whether or not the media was culpable in the end, Dean lost Iowa and the nomination to the presidency in part because of that ten-second clip.
But the media began its ridiculous domination of the campaign with its decision to only air three hours of each convention over the summer. Even though the conventions could have been newsworthy, the networks unilaterally decided that they would not report and would not let the people decide. Even the originator of the "We Report, You Decide" motto, Fox News, chose to air its bloated talking heads like Bill O'Reilly in lieu of showing important speeches.
The most egregious example of television abuse came a few weeks later, on Aug. 4, when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth aired the first in their series of infamous advertisements. I have no objection to the 527's right to air the ads, but I strongly protest the role cable television played. The Swift Boat Vets used their funds to purchase ad time in three swing states - Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia.
Yet everyone in America saw the ad, especially those who watched Fox News. Sean Hannity of "Hannity & Colmes" took exceptional steps to give the group a soapbox to stand on. With a significantly broader audience, the Swift Boat Vets could raise additional funds at no extra cost to their coffers. Each advertisement the 527 group produced was aired by the cable news networks, which then allowed each side to argue their points; few steps were taken to have a non-partisan reporter debunk the Swift Boat Vets' charges. They left that job to the newspapers - The Washington Post and The New York Times - which were not afraid of explaining the truth and telling its readers that the Swift Boat ads are vindictive exaggerations.
Not to say that the other party isn't engaging in the same disingenuous behavior. In an Oct. 20 article in the "Post," media critic Howard Kurtz writes about how the Kerry campaign had created phantom television spots merely to get the news organizations to write about them. All the campaign had to do was allocate minimal funds to produce the ad and let the cable channels run with it. By merely talking about an advertisement's message, the news providers are essentially megaphones, proclaiming the ad man's message from high atop a mountain.
The news cycle of the past few weeks was inundated with an irresponsible reliance on polls. Anyone who has taken a statistics course, in high school or college, can tell you that the margin of error made most of those polls irrelevant. If Kerry jumped three points in that day's poll, he was "gaining momentum," and was "losing steam" if he lost three points. The fact that the margin of error was four or five points wouldn't be significantly mentioned. The televised sensationalism with the polling data has destroyed any remaining credibility the news networks may have had after the 2000 coverage.
So tonight, amidst all the probable reports on confusing ballots and disenfranchised voters, Americans will have to choose a horse to ride on into the night. As the precincts keep reporting in and our country gets closer to finding out who will be the next President, the unavoidable elephant (or donkey) in the room will ask whether the networks got it right this time.
