Showing posts with label Election Coverage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Election Coverage. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

CNN Election Coverage: Making Sense of a Bizarre Campaign Before It Ends


Live Stream: Election day coverage - Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Infowars - 1080p

After a campaign that made media coverage an election issue, Variety examines the spin throughout Election Day across major TV news outlets.

11 a.m. PT: Reporting from outside Trump Tower, CNN reporter Sara Murray made note of the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaignTuesday in Nevada, where Trump claimed that early-voting polls stayed open illegally late to allow voters who showed up after polls closed to vote. Clark County officials, Murray said, claimed that they only stayed open long enough to allow voters who were in line before polls were set to close to vote.

We have at least our first legal challenge of the day, Murray said.

9:40 a.m. PT: With polls open from coast to coast, CNN anchors and pundits wrestled with the question of how what was supposed to be a conventional Presidential election wound up being the most fraught and vitriolic in modern history.

I think were missing a yuge sea change here in our country, said journalist Carl Bernstein, sitting on a political panel on At This Hour with anchors Kate Bolduan and John Berman and appropriating one of GOP nominee Donald Trumps signature expressions. And thats the most significant thing about this election, the idea that a demagogue could run an essentially racist, anti-immigrant, nativist campaign, become the nominee of the Republican party, almost capture the presidency and perhaps capture it this is astonishing.

Bolduan attempted to reel the conversation and the Trump phenomenon back into the mainstream. But millions of voters who voted for Donald Trump and millions who support him dont describe that man in that way at all, she said.

But Bernstein appeared to fight against the CNN tendency toward false equivalence, arguing that there is evidence within Trumps biography and the events of the campaign to talk factually about that campaign being racist, even if all Trumps supporters are not.

In terms of the campaign he ran, in terms of his personal history, in terms of the radical notion of who this candidate is, this is a yuge event in our history, he said. It reflects a change in terms of who the people of the country are and how they view our political system, and it is going to reverberate for many, many years. Did anybody think there was a possibility of this when it started?

The dour, soul-searching tone characterized a broadcast that seemed to be marking time until news worth reporting would begin to pour in later in the day. With no exit-polling yet, much less poll results, a group of panelists with takes more analytic than partisan attempted to make sense of an event that would soon end, but whose final chapter had yet to unfold.

When Donald Trump announced that he would run for President 16 months ago, it happened during this show, Berman said. And I admit that I was one of those people who thought he would never run. Once he announced, I thought he would never stay in the race. Once he stayed in the race I thought he would never win the nomination.

Aside from punditry, analysis, and hand-wringing, CNN also offered the remotes from polling places typical of election-day broadcasts. Reporter Rosa Flores appeared live from Pottawattamie County, Iowa.

The word here is efficiency, Flores said, Because these poll workers have been working very very hard to ensure that the lines are short.

The camera then moved to a table in a mostly empty hall behind which sat six poll workers and in front of which stood one lone voter. As the camera panned the room, it showed poll workers outnumbering voters roughly two-to-one, with most voting booths empty.

Source: http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/cnn-election-coverage-1201912541/

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