TV's election coverage myopic

The folks at CNN should listen to their own lawyer.

As CNN's pundits were pontificating Tuesday night about governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia, and somehow saying that the lackluster Democrats' losses were somehow tied to disenchantment with President Obama, CNN's lawyer-pundit Jeffrey Toobin pointed out that in a few years nobody will remember those gubernatorial races — but we'll still be taking about Maine's marriage vote if the pro-gay side were to win (as seemed possible at the time). The vote in Maine potentially represented a huge change in American culture, he said, as something unthinkable a few years ago had the possibility of passing. Yet CNN remarkably had nobody on the scene in Maine, and for as long as an hour after vote counts were available on the web, Wolf Blitzer was reporting that no numbers were available from the state. And so the blather on the gubernatorial races continued.

The gubernatorial races were news, that's for certain. But TV news (Fox News was following a similar approach) continued to show its nearsightedness. Issues don't matter; only personalities do. Furthermore, it's only those personalities that are close to the power centers of D.C. and New York City. (Even the U.S. House race in upstate New York got little attention, and it was a far more interesting race than either of the gubernatorial contests.)

I'm not sure of the reasons for such myopic coverage. Perhaps it's a matter of scant budgets. Perhaps the TV "journalists" don't feel comfortable talking with small-state gay activists or Catholic priests who support traditional marriage. Perhaps they think that nobody within 50 miles of D.C., New York City or Los Angeles is worth bothering with.

Or maybe they're too busy primping themselves and just happen to see only the close-to-the-Beltway politicos in the mirror.