Wild America ---------------- Tuesday, 2nd November 2004 I had to watch the election coverage for a class and write a paper based on that. It was my homework. But this election was interesting and quite exciting to everyone. My cousin had made up some excuse not to go to work. When I got home he was laying on the couch, the remote controller in hand and he explained, ?I have vacation time.? He is Nepali. His wife is American. She was interested but she not excited about the prospects. She said, ?I will cry if Bush wins again.? Her uncle is gay and she thinks Bush is a ?hatemonger? both at home and abroad. As the night went by and I flipped the channels between FOX News Channel, and CNN and MSNBC and then stuck longer with PBS or BBC America, with every passing comment by yet another political pundit and the charts of the Popular Votes vs. Electoral and their tallies and the US map smeared in Red and Blue states, I came to realize that whatever this political maelstrom meant in surface was deceiving and that the implications of American democratic process was much deeper than the rhetoric that we have been seeing for the last year or so from both sides of campaign soapbox. This year the networks had decided to be more cautious. CBS News went behind the scenes and explained how they were going to ?project? a winner in different races. MSNBC showed how they had developed new codes to explain some outcomes which they could not be accurate on: ?Too Close to Call,? ?Too Early to Call.? The memory of Florida and the debacle that was Election 2000 coverage has at least made the media more careful. I was happy until the polls closed and all the networks joined the bandwagon to tally the ?exit polls.? My question was, if you are having a real election this very day and the results are going to come in about 4 hours and every thing will be clear, why are you reporting the results of some ?poll? again? How about some patience? John Stewart on his fake news show, ?The Daily Show? made perfect sense when he said something to the effect of ?We are the ones who pride in giving erroneous news. Why do you have to tune to those channels when we are already here making mistakes for you?? The only agreement at around 7 PM among all the pundits and all the different networks was that the turnout this year was high. Then after a while word came that it was actually ?very high.? So the differences began. By some strange coincidence every guest speaker at FOX started to think that this high turnout was good for Mr. President and serendipity, the guests in CNN seemed to think that this high turnout meant that Senator Kerry?s chances were quite good. They pointed to those damned exit polls and said that meant good things to the Kerry Campaign. Cut to Kerry Campaign Headquarters in Boston- CNN: ?The mood is one of cautious excitement? & FOX: ?They are showing no emotion.? By this time the ticker on the bottom of the screen had started its continuous slide showing us who are getting the votes. In about an hour of polls closing the results were coming out in a flurry. While all this was happening in the 24 hour news networks on cable, old John Lehrer at PBS was droning about what the Electoral College actually is. I would think with Florida fiasco four years ago every American and even every European, Asian and African should be familiar with the quaint relic of ancient political ritual that is Electoral College. And that ever popular ?hanging chad.? But Lehrer explanation of the Electoral Process had an added significance this year as Colorado had a ballot where they were going to divide the electoral votes in proportion to popular votes cast. If that had been the case in Florida, four years ago, Al Gore would have won. Other important topics of discussion before the election results started to come out in earnest concerned the issue of voter suppressions in various parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania where there had been court rulings giving the parties the right to challenge any person the very right to vote. Every network harked back to Florida. There was little local coverage on any of the networks except the important Senate races like Tom Daschle?s situation in SD or Barrack Obama in IL. Now that was a story that Democratic Strategist loved to talk about- Barrack Obama! The future of Democratic hope! When I was a kid, Nepal Television broadcasted a show called ?Wild America.? It was a nature program narrated by a burly, bearded mountain man named Marty Stouffer. Election night was wild in a completely different way. None of the exotic animals in their natural environment and none of the true information of the situation. If you watched through the coverage of Election 2004, you would feel as if the everything about the process was just a mess and a confusion and every political commentator, no matter their party affiliation, seemed to believe that the magnitude of the election was such that whoever won the Election there could be only two alternatives: either total degradation or complete well being of the American situation. (contd...)