Watching the Election
June 5, 2008 § 1 Comment
Tuning into the coverage Clinton’s and Obama’s speeches last night, I must say that the best analysis was coming from Twitter. All of the major news outlets had uploaded their stories about the respective candidates, citing Clinton’s shortcomings and offering analysis about why she failed, and trumpeting Obama’s clinching the nomination.
What I had just watched on TV and what I was finding on the Internet just didn’t match.
I confess, I bought into the media hype like everyone else, and I was totally expecting Clinton to concede. I haven’t been paying attention to much of either her campaign or Obama’s, and I haven’t watched much of the debates over the last five months because I like them both and I can’t stand to see them get ugly at each other. I was excited for all of this to come to an end so that the dems could stop being so divisive.
I found myself surprised at my response when she did not concede: I was really delighted and proud.
I thought her speech was great, and although she didn’t offer an endorsement of Obama, I thought she offered some incredibly gracious words that over the long term may actually unite her supporters and his.
This was the story, and I was getting no satisfaction from the ready-made stories from the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. It was so obvious that the major news outlets had already written what they intended to publish, and it reflected what they had expected to happen, not what actually had happened. And live TV was not much better! The pundits were so confused and did not know what to make of what had happened. I was left very unsatisfied.
I was honestly getting better coverage and analysis from Twitter. I was more interested in the spontaneous reactions from my Twitter friends, to the news and to each other than anything the pundits had to say.
InFomentation 
[…] election coverage, FriendFeed, political discourse, politics, RNC 2008, Twitter Back in June I blogged about watching coverage of Clinton’s and Obama’s speeches as the vied for the top spot on the Democratic ticket. […]