Friday morning, there wasn’t a major paper in the country that did not have full coverage of the Iowa Caucuses on the front page. Even Friday’s financially-minded Wall Street Journal splashed Huckabee and Obama all over the top of its front page. All of the dailies did the same, both on paper and on their website. In fact, as I write this on Saturday afternoon, the websites for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, MSNBC all have residual news about Thursday’s Iowa caucuses and articles looking ahead to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primaries. Only CNN, of the major news websites, does not still have Iowa caucus news up. This is pretty amazing, since none of the major networks had live Iowa caucus coverage on Thursday night, and CSPAN apparently went on some quixotic campaign to show an entire caucus meeting from beginning to tedious end and make me realize I would rather be trapped in a room with Tom Tancredo and a truck load of illegal immigrants than sit through that mind-numbing process in person.
After unfortunately working late Thursday (all the while following news rolling in via Politico.com and Hotline on Call), I got home to find my wife watching The Apprentice on NBC. “Wha… where is the caucus coverage,” I asked as I dropped my bag to the floor. “CSPAN has some weird local thing on. So, I’m watching this,” she said. “What do you mean some weird local thing?” After she explained it to me, I asked about the networks. “That’s what this is,” she replied, making me realize how dumb a question I had just asked.
As you may have guessed, my wife and I don’t have cable. We don’t want to flush a ridiculous amount of money down the drain for 120 channels when we will only watch 12 of them. Until we can get an a la carte package, it will probably stay that way and we will keep enjoying our NetFlix subscription and get whatever comes through our building wiring (which we are pretty sure is not illegal, considering the cable guy came and set up our internet service and knows what channels come into the TV. Anyway, I digress…)
On caucus night, while every major print media outlet in the country was foaming at the mouth of their website over the Iowa caucuses, and I presume all of the cable media from what I have seen on their websites, NOT ONE OF THE MAJOR NETWORKS HAD LIVE COVERAGE! Instead, I had to battle with my wife over switching back and forth from sleaze like Desperate Housewives to the networks and CSPAN to see if ANYONE had any coverage besides what I was pulling up on my computer. I couldn’t believe it. And, what stunned me even more was that when the news finally came on, it was the local news that we saw – no national coverage until Nightline came on.
Luckily, I had my laptop and was able to keep up with everything, and when the time came, we watched Obama give his victory speech via the live Associated Press feed online. Then at some point CSPAN (which until that night had had great Iowa coverage) woke up and realized they needed to stop showing farmers argue about whether their county should include in its proposal to the state party platform whether the federal or state governments to regulate gay marriage, and they showed John Edwards’ speech.
How pathetically apathetic do the network executives think this country is? Do they not realize how badly Americans want to see someone else as president – if only in their imagination? Why else would voters have accepted the incredibly early beginnings of 2008 campaigns in 2007… er, 2006? Do they really think that TV watchers are so stupid that they don’t want to watch something more intelligent than Donald Trump firing a playmate?
ABC will partially make up for this tonight with its coverage of the New Hampshire debates, but it does not have any primary coverage on its schedule for Tuesday night. Neither do NBC or CBS. And, of course, ABC planned this debate for Saturday night, so who the hell will be home to watch it?