The Daily Background

Thanks to the above video, I will not be watching CBS for election-night coverage.

The video is from a series called CBS First Look, which I think is a cool idea in general. CBS Evening News employees (both on-air personalities but also behind the scenes people) give sneak peeks of what’s going to be on the broadcast that night. It’s very obvious advertising and usually boring and stupid, but I like the concept of getting to know a news team off-air.

This particular video has CBS Capitol Hill correspondent Sharyl Attkisson explaining what CBS’ coverage of the House races will be like on election night. It was extremely poorly done and nobody had anything interesting to say, including political guru Steward Rothenburg, who is quite respected in the serious election community.

I get the feeling that Rothenburg, who has calmly predicted that Democrats will take control of both the House and the Senate Update: House and 4-7 seats in the Senate, was told to stifle any actual opinions he had so that CBS could look unbiased.

When Attkisson asks him about the House races (which he knows one hell of a lot about), he says “I don’t know, I’m counting on you to tell me what’s going to happen… I have minimal input here, it seems” Attikisson laughs it off like it was a harmless joke. Which it might have been, but it seems incredibly true. Rothenburg never does tell her anything substantive about the races.

Attikisson also holds up a sheet of paper, which she explains contains super-secret information which she doesn’t want viewers to know about. She does the Republican tactic of using the word “Democrat” instead of “Democratic” and explains that she has a super secret list of races that are…. well, expected to switch parties. They don’t want people to know what seats these are, she explains, and warns the cameraman not to zoom in on her sheet of paper.

How stupid is that? The average CBS Evening News viewer probably has no idea what seats are going to switch hands, and probably knows very little about races outside of their own state and Congressional district (if they even know much about that). But for CBS to act all elitist, like they have super secret sources on both sides of the aisle that nobody else has, who are telling them what races are competitive and what races are going to switch sides is such incredible bullshit. And they want to for some reason keep this supposedly “exclusive” “insider” information from their viewers.

So in short, I won’t be watching CBS on election night. They obviously are too busy looking like they have info that we in the blogosphere and every election analyst has to be actually informative. Stupid, stupid, stupid. As far as my election-night television fix, I will probably be watching a combination of CNN and MSNBC. But of course most of my information-collection will happen online. Obviously I hope you’ll join me right here on this blog for election-night coverage.

Filed under: News Media, oh six midterm Elections, Z-TDB Blog