Meg's Bitersweet "Party"

On Tuesday night our nation voted.  That means one thing: media madness.  Every one of our nation's news outlets flooded to watch parties, polling places, campaign offices and hotel ballrooms to cover the results.  As a journalism student, I had the chance to cover one of these events with the rest of the media, and made a few interesting - and some disturbing - realizations about the media world.

The coverage was complete. There were national news outlets, all the local stations had a team on the media riser, multiple languages could be heard in the ballroom, there were even crews from Northern California.  This was the place to be as, win or lose, we were going to see Meg Whitman, the force behind one of the nation's highest profile races in the 2010 midterm election.  I was there to cover for Annenberg TV News, which is the school's nightly newscast, and we were instantly secluded to the boonies of the media riser, taking the top-left corner of a media riser set up to absorb more than 50 different outlets.  While the media facilities were buzzing with activity all afternoon as reporters did live takes and interviews, it wasn't until 8:30 that a single civilian made it into the ballroom.

This brings me to my first realization.  There was nothing going on in this location for three quarters of the time the media was there.  Nothing. By the time 8:30 rolled around and our equipment had been set up for over six hours, people started to flood in, full of excitement as returns showed Republicans routing their Democrat challengers.  But at a party that was intended as a potential victory lap for a candidate was deflated before a single person walked into the room.  At 8:00 conservative megaphone Fox News had already called the race for Whitman's opponent, Governor-Elect Jerry Brown.

Instantly the entire party felt like a gargantuan waste of money.  The excess signage, the big-screen TVs the full service bars, the food spreads at the media filing center - it all seemed pointless knowing that Whitman's race would be called before the party started.  Nonetheless, the crowd arrived and people were awkwardly excited as California's most expensive gubernatorial campaign had failed, but countless other races were won traditionally by other Republican counterparts.  It was weird.

Then came the gem of the night.  No, it wasn't meg, but rather a campaign publicist who pulled one of the most peculiar moves I have seen in my media-based adventures.  At around 9:30 p.m. as everyone was wondering when Whitman would concede, a press relations secretary told the AP news reporter that her candidate wouldn't concede until 75% of the vote was tallied.  That headline was pumped through the AP wire from our ballroom, and soon we saw TV stations reporting the same information on big-screens around the room.  Suddenly the campaign staffer emerged again, retracting her statement, eliminating the 75% rule in an effort to quell the media frenzy set off by the statement.

I had seen it, a full media gaffe cycle.  From inception to retraction, I had seen the entire thing happen.   This was 1) cool and 2) shocking to see in real life.  It ultimately summed up what was a night of conjured sensationalism.  From the special signage to the overzealous media coverage, to the gaffes of campaign workers, I had seen a complete picture of the way our country has made a spectacle of our own electorate.

Walking away from the party at 11:15 without ever seeing Whitman before our crew went off-air, I couldn't help but view the night as a ridiculous flushing of my time down the toilet.  During the election season, we can far too often get swept up in the glitz and glamour of a election.  Whitman's awkwardly bittersweet "party" epitomized our vicious election culture.