This Just In

    I don't watch much television news.  There's too much show business in it for me.  Even CNN has become infected.  (Of the hucksters at Fox News we need only say that P.T. Barnum would approve.)
    In what follows I will display a prejudice or two.  Let me begin by admitting it, and by saying a few things that I think are nonetheless fair.
    Every news medium has strengths and weaknesses.  Print -- my lifelong professional home -- is deeper and more complete than the electronic types.  But nowadays it is anachronistically slow. Also, alongside the Internet, it is no longer the best cafeteria in town. It no longer has the broadest menu.
    Television is timely, easy to consume and, heaven knows, ubiquitous. But TV is predisposed toward stories that can be told in pictures,  and toward events -- stuff that happens at specific times and places.
     Elections are events that combine the bloviating extremes of electoral politics with the breathless, uptothheminuteeyewitnessalwaysonguard persona of TV news. One campaign or another always wants to inflate the importance of an election result. The TV cameras are always ready.  The outcome can be darn near operatic.  Consider the Iowa caucuses, where two-thirds fewer people  voted than in my home county's last election for register of deeds.
    Election nights can be a conspicuously mixed experience for reluctant viewers like me.  The returns flow in at their own pace. But the alwaysonguard eyewitnesses have to be watching, watching, watching. Early in the evening of the Michigan primary, the anchors on two networks talked as much about the bells and whistles on their touch-screen displays as they did about the trickling returns.  One anchor actually congratulated an analyst on his touch-screen form. (Who knew there were style points?)
    I particularly enjoyed an early exchange that went this way:
    Analyst: Governor Romney is doing well in parts of the state where he needs to do well if he's to win.
    Anchor: Yes, if this trend continues he'll be in good shape.
     Translation:  If Governor Romney keeps winning, he'll win.
     At moments like those, I entertain a favorite fantasy (PREJUDICE ALERT!!!).  Two anchors gaze into the camera.  He could be modeling men's grooming products.  She looks like a refugee from the Stepford Wives.
    She: Golly, Biff, we've been broadcasting for quite a while, but nothing is really happening yet.
    He: Yes, Muffy, but we have air time to fill.  I wonder if the viewers would like to see my vacation pictures.
     My unkind image does touch on a serious point.  Even the most prominent names in television news may talk a lot without actually saying anything.  Instead they hold a mirror up to others. If those others are babbling and dissembling, the result accentuates the essential shallowness of the medium.  Thus we have a year in which some of TV's most incisive political commentary is being delivered outside the news shows -- by comedians.
     Meanwhile, important stories unfold that are not so easily told in pictures, and are not focused in a discrete event.  One of this year's big ones has so far been little noted:  In the aggregate, turnout in the Republican primaries has been low. A big verdict has been delivered by people who voted with their feet -- or, more precisely, with their buns, by keeping them couch-bound on election day. A lot of folks have declined to attend the circus.
    All this being said, the American electorate tends to be pretty level-headed over an expanse of time -- which is the terrain on which democracy works. Voters don't take all their information from campaigning politicians, through whatever medium. They form their views from a much larger set of considerations. (I think people paid attention while House Speaker John Boehner and the other Big Men on Campus were hazing the freshman Obama. Americans don't like bullies. I'm curious to see how much they'll remember in November.)
     So, the campaigns will continue to dispirit a lot of us.
     Television news will continue to annoy me.
     The Republic will survive.
     But I do wish Wolf Blitzer could go 10 minutes without telling me I'm in the Situation Room.