Sneak peek at this Sunday's show
By Cassie Spodak, CNN
Where were you Tuesday night? Glued to your TV screen? Compulsively checking your Twitter feed? Although most outlets called the election for President Obama between 11:12pm and 11:30pm it played out quite differently depending on what channel you were watching: power outages and a “sleepy” anchor at ABC, Karl Rove questioning the Ohio projection on Fox, jubilation at MSNBC, and masterful magic walls at CNN.
Jackie Kucinich of USA Today, Peter Baker of The New York Times, and Fred Francis, former correspondent for NBC News,discuss how the media storm played out the night of the election as well as pundits already sounding off on the future of the GOP and what went wrong.
This Sunday at 11am ET.
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Brian Stelter is the host of "Reliable Sources" and the senior media correspondent for CNN Worldwide. Before he joined CNN in November 2013, Stelter was a media reporter for The New York Times. He is the author of the New York Times best-seller "Top of the Morning."
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Howard–
See the NBC televised story (by Carey Sanders) on the Florida result ("After delay, frustration, Obama wins Florida") ? Here's where we are in journalism, and why people of every part of the political spectrum have a right to complain: there's no REPORTING in it. Liebling is turning over in his grave (and laughing). The anchor does ask why FL can't get its act together, but the story DOESNT ACTUALLY INVESTIGATE that question, because it doesn't interrogate anything. . It just shows that, Yup, FL can't get its act together. There's no list of reasons WHY the governor might have made the decisions he did (only the suggestion that he's supported by the Tea Party), and the observation that the ballot was long and complicated. But there's not attempt to ask even the SIMPLEST questions about the mechanisms, politics, and economy of voting–why are there long lines? Why aren't there more polling places, more machines and ways to vote, and more people counting the ballots? Why are ballots counted faster in California–a more populous state– than in Florida? Who counts the votes? Who makes the voting machines? How do they work? [I did see some reporting on this, but only when the PA voter trying to vote for Obama videoed the machine malfunction] . How are they sold, to whom, and what are the details of that contract–i.e., how much does a voting machine cost and what's the quality control on them? Who pays for the voting machines? Etc etc. Who benefits from the long lines? What percentage of FL voters actually voted? It's infuriating that the majority of reporting is pure fluff or pretense (of objectivity) at best and acceptance of ignorance at worst, an pure abdication of the job description. REPORT. This was followed by Andrea Mitchell "breaking" the Petraus story, which is just pure gossip–in the old days such a story would have been "broken" by Winchell. Are Sy Hersh and Tim Weiner the only real reporters left? Liebling used to love to lampoon Hearst, but we are now so far down the yellow journalism brick road that the old Hearst papers look like IF Stone compared to NBC.
Republicans appear to be at a loss in trying to understand their recent electoral loss to President Obama, and the major media haven’t been helpful in explaining the substance of the choice made by voters because they prefer to cover each campaign simply as an extended horse race.
If we can’t get past the racetrack metaphor, maybe we should at least switch our thinking from Thoroughbred to Standardbred or harness racing, where two different styles prevail. Like many Republicans, “pacers” are horses bred and trained to use hobbles to keep both right-side legs going at the same time. In contrast, Obama’s vision follows the “trotting” practice of advancing a left front and right hind leg together in order to achieve a more balanced forward movement.
Giraffes and camels are born pacers—I’m not sure about dinosaurs—but human children naturally crawl in a trot on the way to learning to walk as adults.