blog #7

For this blog I watched a half hour of the coverage on ABC and a half hour of coverage on NBC. I have to be honest and say that this was honestly one of the longest hours of my life. I do not really support either candidate did not have someone I really wanted and I found this cover long and boring. I happened to choose two stations who's coverage seemed to be pretty unbiased. They stations focused on providing up to date information on the coverage which states were going which way. There were lots of graphs and maps and other types of information presenters. I think that these tools along with the lack of support for one candidate in specific made the whole thing much more bearable because I was able to act like it was just some report. I did feel a little bit of relief as each state came in because I am so tired of all the politics that has been flying around campus and can finally talk to people without hearing soapbox speeches of why their candidate is the best and how anyone who doesn't agree is naive or an idiot. These coverages, while mainly unbiased, seemed to be somewhat conservative. The reporters all seemed to be somewhat reserved and the feeling of the station in general was conservative. Their audience seemed to be anyone who was conservative and people who wanted an impartial coverage of the election. I believe that this was an attempt to appeal to as many viewers as possible and therefor have the highest ratings. Both stations made appeals to logos with all their graphs and statistics, which was something I was very grateful for. There was also a feeling of trying to seem human that I got from the stations. In the background of some of the shots you could see the rest of the newsroom. Why I got a feeling of being human from these shots is because the background was filled with people running around and everyone just looking completely busy. This made it feel like there was a definite human aspect to this information, reminding that it is being put together by a bunch of people at the station, not just some big computer in the back room somewhere. I believe that this was an attempt to keep people interested in the station, saying "Look at how much work we're doing to present this for you, the least you could do is watch!" Again I feel that this was just a well thought out ploy for higher ratings, I always feel that everything that stations do is purely for the ratings, not because they care. I don't particularly blame the stations, I know that it's a taboo and that more than a few people will want to come after me for saying it but, thank god the election is over, I am so tired of hearing about it and frankly don't care that it was Obama, I didn't support either candidate.