The news thirst is real

It was a hot night (mostly because it’s November and you had the heating on). It’s late and you’re after some satisfaction. You turn on the TV and there he is — the same place he’s been for the last three days — all khaki trousers and rolled-up shirt sleeves. ‘Let me tell you about the latest big dump from Allegheny County, Baby’ (The ‘Baby’ is silent but implied) and you can barely contain yourself. Then he whips out his calculator…

One of the saving graces during the five days the US Presidential Election slowly but surely crept its way to a conclusion was Leslie Jones, and many others, deepening passion for Steve Kornacki, a national political correspondent and commander in chief of the results map at the MSNBC news channel. Just take a look at the #KornackiThirst hashtag on Twitter to see what I mean. His combination of overtired nerd and numbers porn kept many a viewer coming back for more, day after day after day… so much so that those khakis are now one of the Gap’s top sellers.

I’m more of a CNN girl myself though. Despite being a channel political satire hero, Jon Stewart, once described as a ‘tasteless gruel of news’, it has bucked up in recent years mostly due to a bevvy of silver foxes who have brought back a bit of something frequently lacking in American news media of the 21st century: journalistic integrity. Over the election, rather than their individual shows, there was a kind of news and opinion megamix. Anchored by walking aptronym Wolf Blitzer (I mean could he really be called anything else???) and CNN’s own ‘map daddy’, John King, breaking (Republican) hearts and really overusing the term ‘key race alert’, the days zipped around, team to team with all the channels greatest hits on repeat shuffle mode. There was Chris Cuomo, the younger brother of New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who sometimes gets picked on by his older sibling like they’re still living at home and Andy’s just given him a big wedgy; Jake Tapper, internet darling for his consistently witty honest commentary on the Trump Administration, along with Dana Bash and Abby Phillip rounding out a knowledge threesome that sometimes bordered on a political gossip version of The View; And finally but never least, Anderson Cooper whose blue eyes put even Jon Snow’s sock collection in the shade and whose reporting from hurricane hit cities to war torn countries were clearly all preparation for sitting in a room with Rick Santorum for four days straight. Indeed two of the ‘moments’ from this election happened on Cooper’s segments. Firstly, the emotional reaction of Democrat pundit, Van Jones, to Biden being announced as President-Elect. Despite having worked with the Trump White House on criminal justice reform, he broke down, telling Anderson and the viewership that it was easier to be a parent today. The second came from Cooper himself when after Trump’s insane ‘I won and everyone else is to blame’ rant on the Thursday evening, he described the President as an ‘obese turtle flailing on its back in the hot sun’ which, if a little unfair to fat turtles, is certainly descriptive (he apologised for the comment the next day) and just a few days ago, with Biden now confirmed to have won 306 electoral votes yet Trump’s continuing to refusal to concede dominating the headlines, Cooper’s opening remarks were another sincere take on the state of the nation and what really matters:

Name calling and tears aside, no discussion of American news media is complete without Fox News — sure they may not have the hotties (unless Chris Wallace is your kinda thing) but they make up for it by all to often being part of the story themselves. This election was no exception. Well known for their right-wing bias, Fox called Arizona for Biden on Thursday with only three quarters of the votes counted. By many accounts this drew the orange wrath of Trump and practically single handedly turned the jubilant White House still riding the ‘red mirage’ of Tuesday night into sour grapes city. It was perhaps one of the first reality checks that something was going very wrong for the over tanned occupant and very right for the scrappy guy from Scranton. Fox News themselves became a microcosm of what was happening in the Republican party over subsequent days. Reality dawned in some areas pretty quickly but other hosts and pundits backing up Trump’s unfounded charges of fraud, perhaps genuinely unable to give up on the dream or maybe, and more likely, desperate to hold on to their own corner of power over the obsessive Trump base that makes up most of their viewership — a group that Fox have been fueling long before that infamous descent down a golden escalator back in 2015.

But the truth is it might be too late for Fox. One of the many rumours of what Trump will do after he eventually comes to terms with Biden’s win, is setting up his own media channel in direct competition with them and the rest of the news outlets. Maybe this was the plan all along, maybe his ‘enemies of the people’ line wasn’t just another dig at an American institution but (much like his accusations of voter fraud even when he won in 2016) a long play to shake trust and make himself the obvious alternative. Fox will fall and Trump will rise.

The hope, of course, is that other news channels retain this new found sense of truth to power journalism, that they continue to call out lies whichever side of the political divide they come from, that they fulfill their role laid out by Thomas Jefferson as the ‘only tocsin of a nation’ and cement their function as the fourth estate of democracy. This will depend on a lot — most of these outlets are still owned and managed by vast corporations and beholden to advertisers and shareholders, a problem that has long led to the argumentative and performative journalism they are so frequently criticised for. Time will tell and it’s a given that there will be plenty of opportunities for them to prove themselves over the coming months from the ongoing influence of Trump and the clinging power of a Republican Senate to questions over whether Biden can keep his promises on unity while inviting in progressive policies from the left.

So keep watching not just to quench you news hottie thirst but also to see if the oldest democracy in the world can also keep good, challenging and free journalism at its heart.