Part 1 of a 5 part series
This morning, Tom Brokaw helped kick off NBC’s Super Tuesday coverage with a story about how voter anger and disillusionment are playing out in this year’s presidential primaries. We can talk about how this isn’t the whole story in another post. Today, we want to kick off our #Election2016 series – Election Moments We Love – with a little #SuperTuesday humor.
How does this help change the conversation, hearts and minds, etc? Before we start changing stuff, we thought we could add a different kind of historical perspective and a little bit of fun into today’s Super Tuesday coverage. Because why start with anger and disillusionment when you can start with election moments we love?
Let’s begin our electoral coverage look back with our favorite media moments from the 2012 presidential election. You really can’t make this stuff up.
2012: Landslide on the Left, Erosion on the Right
2012 wasn’t a particularly notable year for new technology (whatever happened to Google Glass?), but that didn’t stop CNN from filling election-related airtime with obviously unnecessary gadgets. It’s not totally their fault – the primary season was a little slower than usual. After all, the Democratic primary was nothing if not predictable (thanks Obama!), while the mixed results of the Republican primaries led to what Jon Stewart aptly called ‘Endless Suffrage.’ -- possibly the most accurate political media satire of the pre-Veep era. By the time Gallup administered its annual ‘Confidence in US Institutions’ Poll in June 2012, Americans’ trust of political media was at an all-time low – just 21% of respondents reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in TV news as a whole. That’s only about five points higher than the public’s approval of Congress for the same period, and as we are not the first to write, nobody likes Congress.
Meanwhile, the Internet was doing what it does best – making fun of everything. This was, after all, the year that shattered the glass ceiling with binders full of women. The Internet responded by not only curating this amazing Tumblr but also by turning Amazon product reviews into a comedic art form. There were calls to colonize the moon and put children to work, all imbued with a rich sense of mid-1990’s culture, from SimCity to Pokemon. The listicles practically wrote themselves.
See Brokaw, it's not all about anger and disillusionment.
What election moments do you love? Tell us about it in the comments.