We'll start with the obvious one.
It's tedious
When you boil down election coverage on any channel, it's just people stating a whole bunch of numbers at you. And what's worse, they keep going back to the same five seats over and over again every few minutes as if the entire election depended on those five seats. Now, to be fair, in this election it was probably more justified than before, but we didn't know that until several hours into the counting. It also doesn't help if the numbers you have don't match the graphics you have, either because you've got updated numbers or because you've pulled up the wrong seat to look at.
The sad fact is that there's nothing you can do about all this. They try to mix things up by crossing to different people every so often, but all they do is repeat the same stuff that the main panel have been saying already. You could just have a scrolling screen of text and numbers and that would be just as informative and interesting, but there's a hidden problem with that which we'll get to later.
Politicians Shouldn't Be On The Panels
There are several reasons for this. The first is that most stations opt for at least one politician from each major party, and that results primarily in snarky sniping at each other rather than meaningful conversation and analysis. It was bad enough on the ABC, and I shudder to think what it was like on the commercial networks where things are a little less tightly run in terms of political statements.
The representative of the party doing well also always seems to have a certain smugness about them, and subtly tries to rub it in to their losing opponent. In 2007 it was the ALP, and this year it was the Coalition. It doesn't matter who it is, it's pointless, childish, and doesn't even make good television.
But perhaps the worst thing of all is that (in most cases) one party eventually has to lose on the night, and when that moment comes it's gut wrenching to see how that particular panellist reacts. I'll be honest and say that I didn't particularly want the Coalition to win in 2007, but when the ALP won and I had to sit through one of the Coalition politicians realise live on television that they'd lost the election (I think it was Joe Hockey), it was extremely hard to watch and I genuinely felt sorry for them. No one should have to be put through that sort of emotional stress live on television, and no one should have to see it. We were lucky that we avoided the full force of it this election because I don't think I could have sat through it, no matter which party it was.
This also isn't going to change. Networks will continue to put politicians on their panels for two main reasons. Firstly, the higher the politician's profile, the higher the chance the network will get good ratings. Yes, even the nation's most important event comes down to a desperate grab for ratings and bragging rights. Secondly, it gives the networks access to insider analysis from the major parties. Now, I would argue that you can probably get that information anyway without having the politicians on the panel, but that would bring us back to the point about ratings.
The concept of the analysis from the parties brings us nicely to the biggest, dirtiest secret of election TV coverage of them all.
The Number of Seats "Won" Isn't The Same As What the AEC Says
If you were like me, and were following the election on TV and on the AEC's Virtual Tally Room, you would have noticed a huge discrepancy in basically every number being quoted in any context. The number of seats awarded was well below what the AEC had on their website, and the swings were definitely not matching up. I suspect this is because the seats as awarded by the networks are based not only on raw numbers, but on insider knowledge from the parties, behind the scenes analysis, and some raw assumptions.
That's why the numbers at the bottom of the screen keep changing all the time. The criteria under which they award the seat is much less stringent than the criteria used by the AEC. When I gave up and stopped watching at about 10 p.m., the ABC had only 8 seats undecided because they were still to be counted or too close to call. The AEC's Virtual Tally Room had aover four times that number because of the way they determine whether a seat has been won.
This worries me, because it may only be a matter of time before this methodology comes back to haunt the TV networks. One day they might declare a party has the majority, only to find out a few hours later that they were wrong, making themselves and potentially a lot of other people look like fools in the process.
At least it'd shake the coverage up a bit, though.
We'll Still Watch It, Even If We Don't Want To
Television coverage is the easiest, most convenient way to figure out what's going on. Even if we don't want to watch the coverage because we know how awful it's going to be, we'll still have it on because we want to know who's going to govern our country. I guess taking an interest in the future of our country is noble enough, but it's a pity that in order to do so we have to put up with dull coverage, sacrifice the dignity some politicians, and risk getting the wrong conclusion anyway.
I also put a further vote up here as to the lameness of Election Coverage:
ReplyDelete"Well, we're in a strong position as we're ahead by a solid 20% with a swing of about 5% towards us. However, you have to remember that less than 1% of the vote in our electorate has been counted."
*may have been slightly embellished... but the "strong position" and "less than 1%" are still true*
I saw this on Channel 7s coverage whilst flicking through to see who was doing what... and promptly decided to stick on ABC.
Election coverage is pretty crap.
Any numbers prior to ~15% of an electorate's votes tallied are usually pure randomness.. outside of Ultra-Safe Seats. Maybe. That's roughly 2 hours of coverage that we could do without.