Imagine for a moment that the Storm of the Century (this
century!) is heading for the Eastern seaboard. Imagine further
that, in a bold, savvy move to re-invent government, the fictional
federal administration (a) has already privatized NOAA and all
other weather gathering offices and (b) has sold them to the
All-Weather Cable Network.
Near-miraculously, the storm completely dissipates before it
hits land, but, bowing to the pleas and threats from the Acme
Umbrella Company (its wholly owned, beleaguered corporate parent),
All-Weather continues to broadcast dire alerts of rain, wind and
flooding — pushing just ending quarterly sales of umbrellas and
galoshes through the roof.
Imagine the rage of the citizenry when they learn they’ve been
had; the sheepish explanations from executives that “we did the
country a favor to get people to purchase emergency supplies
they’ll eventually need” simply don’t cut it. Subscribership to the
channel dips as their credibility is shot. Acme sales plummet, but,
worst of all, both parent and subsidiary face ongoing, withering
ridicule from the late night comedy shows.
On November 5, Brokaw, Jennings and Rather may not look like
umbrella salesmen spiking news of impending drought — but they
are. Posing as newsmen, they are deceitfully extracting a
payment (time and attention) from every viewer in return for an
unnecessary product (stale news). If, mistakenly thinking your vote
still mattered in what was in fact a landslide, you had canceled or
delayed a valuable activity in order to vote, then their
misdemeanor becomes even more serious. But don’t expect the news
nobles to experience the same blowback of anger and ridicule that
singed the executives at Acme Umbrella — America’s anchormen are
merely carefully choreographed players in a biannual national
Kabuki ritual.
AND A WONDERFUL FORTY-YEAR PAGEANT it has been: though expensive
and evanescent, projecting the results of just concluded elections
has historically been one of the primary activities the big
networks use to define themselves as a dominant social and
political force. The early sixties marked the transformation of the
television networks from chroniclers of the vote tally into priests
of projection. At that time, they alone had the resources to
conduct the exit polls, communicate that information, crunch it on
new-fangled computers, and then — often by midday — make reasoned
calls of the ultimate outcome. Probably due to a combination of
self-interest and a sense of civic responsibility (licenses meant
something in those days), they revealed projections of a given race
only when that state’s polls had closed.
For the higher purpose of prompt projections within a sensible
budget, the networks early on colluded, basically creating the same
kind of monopolistic instrument against which “progressive”
journalism has been crusading for over a century. First, they
shared exit poll information with each other. Then, in 1990, the
arrangement was formalized with the creation of the Voters News
Service (VNS), a consortium to pool both exit polling results and
news prediction.
Sure, there were goofs, pratfalls and “mischief” along the way.
An occasional projection had to be reversed the morning after;
Californians would chronically grumble about the presidential
projections that appeared prior to her own polls closing. Jimmy
Carter is still vilified by Golden State Democrats for quitting
early Election Night ‘80, thus presumably screwing the rest of the
state’s ticket. Nonetheless, until 2000, the system by and large
held together — meaning that voter/viewers held little or no
leverage.
Then, the VNS cruised into its own perfect storm. A close
national race, a few honest errors, and a radically changed mass
communications environment for the first time brought serious
scrutiny to the consortium. In Florida, the VNS provided the data
that directly led to the networks’ humiliating election night
triple reversal of projected victor. Worse, this mother of all
forecasting snafus occurred in the very election cycle where
alternate forms of news delivery came of age. Beginning on election
morning with unauthorized leaks of VNS’s own projections, websites
like the Drudge Report effectively exposed the emperors’ nakedness.
On television, the cable news networks inevitably trumped the
networks with more and earlier airtime. By Wednesday morning, we
had a meltdown of the operative network paradigm: that neatly
structured, well-anchored election broadcast beginning at 7:00 p.m.
eastern and reporting westward as the polls closed.
Today, VNS faces the same classic threats to extinction that
devil all cartels. It has lost monopolistic control of supply
(news, results) to other producers. And, thanks to Mr. Drudge and
his many spawns, the barrier to entry as a competitor has plummeted
by a factor of several hundred million. While the VNS has a perfect
right, morally speaking, to continue to withhold privately gathered
information, the reward for that behavior will continue to
diminish.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, FOR THIS ELECTION, the news outlets have
announced a complete restructuring of the VNS process. They say
they will be “transparent” — explaining as they go their sources
of information and why they are calling the races the way they are.
But, an examination of the culture of network electoral
reporting would suggest that this perestroika promises to
be as successful as Premier Gorbachev’s savvy strategy to reform
the USSR while maintaining central control.
At the end of the day, it is not the networks’ attitudes towards
computers that will prevent true reform — rather, it will be their
attitude toward voters. The establishment media both buy in and
propagate a pernicious zeitgeist that, at its core, views voters as
children. Like children, voters must be cajoled, sweet-talked,
assisted, fed or bribed with other considerations. From the
networks’ perspective, for the purpose of increasing
“participation,” it is neither dastardly nor manipulative, but
rather noble to prevent people from making an informed
decision about how to allocate their time.
This attitude is philosophically joined at the hip with the
growing national mindset that voting is a sacrament of
self-actualization that should not be denied due to past felonious
behavior, current lack of registration, or (here in California)
even lack of citizenship. (In other cases there is no
philosophy: “get out the vote” or “register to vote” campaigns are
often cynical, highly targeted attempts to achieve specific results
while evading campaign finance laws.) For both the networks and the
ultra-suffragists, turnout is the ultimate barometer of
national electoral health. Their ideal, apparently, is government
by the indifferent.
Unfortunately, an infantilized public inevitably makes bad
decisions. When the left criticizes capitalism, one of its
chestnuts is that American business shortchanges society through
short-term planning horizons. If indeed long-term strategic
perspective is a virtue, why has every single election “reform” of
the last twenty years diluted the number of invested, long-term
thinkers in the electoral pool? The original constitutional
criterion limiting suffrage exclusively to male land holders
probably strikes most today as Paleolithic: but, as we face a new
hundred year war against terrorism and at home the structural
bankruptcy of our wealth transfer programs, the essential wisdom of
having democratic leadership chosen by those with the most at stake
has never been more obvious.
Just as it does from every farmers’ market to every stock
market, the free flow of truthful information will cause
the blossoming — not the shriveling — of the electoral
process. Many people of good intent still possess the misplaced
fear that premature voter knowledge skews elections. But
the danger is not from knowledge before, during or after the
balloting. Rather, the threat to the momentum of a political cause
lies in the propagation of disinformation — either
strategic or inadvertent — in an artificially restricted knowledge
environment. Without the checks and balances only possible when
there exists a free flow of information, anyone with an agenda can
manipulate voters. With appropriate stimuli, the populace can be
induced to vote — or induced to stay home. The cultural mandarins
in the media and politics have it exactly wrong: by opening the
national dialogue to include all available knowledge, there will be
less opportunity for mischief, as the checks and balances
of free information will police the liars, manipulators and
incompetents.
ALL LOVERS OF DEMOCRACY — NO MATTER where they are on the
political spectrum — need to get rid of their squeamishness
regarding early election returns. Partisans must emotionally detach
themselves from the irrational fear that unmanaged, pre-mature
results and projections can hurt their cause. Two years later, many
Republicans are still yelping about how Florida results were
reported before the Panhandle people had finished voting. They need
to get over it. Regarding all electoral information,
confident campaigns should be saying, “bring it on.”
The new reality of one continuous news cycle streaming
concurrently across a range of media offers an under-appreciated
opportunity to strengthen democracy. There is no reason that
interested lay citizens shouldn’t get their hands on real time
electoral data — much as in the past decade they have kicked their
way into the Wall Street club via online portfolio management. One
example of real transparency would be to make the raw
data of exit polling available for all to download
and continuously update. Inevitably, some entity would provide
tweakable shareware for average people to make our own projections.
These customized scenarios could even then be fed back, aggregated
with thousands of other projections to create a kind of cosmic
consciousness that would probably achieve uncanny accuracy. And,
assuming personal anonymity can be assured on an electronic voting
machine, what is wrong with real time actual returns pulsed hourly
from each precinct? Much like an electrocardiogram recording
heartbeats, these interstitial snapshots may well expose — and
ultimately reduce — voting fraud. Power, prestige, and — yes —
revenue will flow to those media whose data combine timeliness with
integrity.
Someday, the VNS cartel — or its replacement — will crash and
burn. It is in the best interests of all those who prefer a robust
democracy to make that day come sooner rather than later. If, this
Tuesday night, every single incumbent in the country wins
re-election, just remember that the winds of change are still
blowing, and, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, you don’t need the
All-Weather Channel to tell you.
