Friday, October 31, 2008

I Hate the CNN Electoral Map!

CNN for the most part does a pretty good job of covering politics (Nothing can touch NPR). Although I feel that they are just a little biased towards the democratic party, I think they have very thorough programming. Plus, I am voting democrat this election. So it doesn't bother me. Anyway, I am not writing today about the ills of media bias. I am writing because I hate that stupid electoral map that they show on CNN. I feel like some baby boomer decided that the CNN election coverage needed to have a more techy feel to grab the attention of generation next, X, and Y. For those of you who do not watch CNN regularly, let me explain.

The CNN electoral Map is a giant flat panel touch screen. It kind of has the iphone thing going on. On the screen is a map of the United States in which each state is either dark blue-for a democratic state, light blue-for a likely democratic state, dark red-for a highly republican state, light red- for a slightly republican state, or yellow for a swing state. A CNN correspondant stands in front of this screen and taps it and drags stuff changing dark blue to light blue, or yellow states to red, red states to blue, dark blue to light blue, yada, yada, yada! While he is doing this, the possible number of electoral votes for both candidates changes each time. The news anchor looks on in awe like, "wow thank you so much for showing America that you can use a giant iphone".

No one can follow that stupid map! The information changes too fast and they have offer no valuable information! That's really all I have to say about that.

1 comment:

Theo said...

Yeah, that map is annoying. Actually, all coverage bothers me. Why can't we just wait until Friday and get accurate results? Why are we calling states the night of the election after hardly any votes have been counted? And what the fuck is up with our outdated voting system? Can we move it into the 20th century at the very least?