The day has come

The day has come. Today we are referred to as a demographic instead of people. We are liberals or conservatives. We live in red states or blue states. We are grouped by our age, color and income. We have become useless statistics for news stations to keep viewers glued to the television. Exit polls are now apparently news.

Stations like CNN, FOX, MSNBC and ABC are showing non-stop election coverage and all their Web sites are being updated by the second. Every news station wants to be the first to project a state’s votes but it feels like no one wants to be correct station.

As of 6:56 pm, Tuesday, Nov. 4, CNN.com has projected Obama has 199 Electoral votes to McCain’s 78. At the same time MSNBC.com has projected Obama has 200 Electoral votes and McCain has a projected 124. McCain has 46 more Electoral votes from one site to another. ABC has given McCain 130 votes and FOX has taken down its tracker.

This seems to all go back to the 24-second news cycle. The invention of the World Wide Web has changed how journalism and newsrooms attack events such as the election. People now want to see statistics and which states voted for Obama or McCain. To keep up with the competition, news stations update numbers and stories without fully knowing the whole story.

It’s hard to find credibility in news stations when four different stations have four different numbers for each candidate. 

There is also a sense of over coverage. There are ireporters in every state sending in their video reports. There are breakdowns on how middle-aged teachers with two kids and drive four door cars voted (OK that might be an exaggeration). There are “experts” predicting how I am going to vote when they don’t even know me or my beliefs.

Whatever happened to just reporting the numbers as they are confirmed? Why happened to news anchors telling people to stay tuned for the actual results? What happened to the news just being news? I guess that day has already passed.