Commentary: I won’t be watching the ‘chartthrobs’ this election. Neither should you
I cannot profess to much success in the way of viral fame. On my social media you will find no thirst traps, no meme-inspired Halloween costumes, vanishingly few “dunks,” “prompts” or other indicators of broad audience appeal; outside of the occasional full-length takedown (Ellen DeGeneres, “Bros”), my vibe online tends to be more “live-tweeting my latest ‘Love Is Blind’ binge.” But I have had one bright and shining moment on Twitter, back when the platform still went by that name.
The day I popularized the term “chartthrobs.”
Laid up in a frigid L.A. apartment with a nasty case of bronchitis, glued to cable news from sunup to midnight, I spent countless hours before, during and after election day 2020 watching wonks like MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki and CNN’s John King and Phil Mattingly dissect turnout: early and day-of, in-person and mail-in, not only in the swing states that decided the outcome, but also the swing districts, the swing precincts. By the time I fired off my portmanteau replacement for the uninspired “map kings,” I possessed a granular understanding of the vote, batch by batch, that surpassed even my fanatical attention to the 2000 election in eighth grade.
Reader, I am not going back. And neither should you.
I say this not because I distrust the analysis on offer, or dislike the personalities onscreen. In fact, it is because I know how easily I could be lulled into another glazed-eyed week fretting over outstanding ballots in Philadelphia or Phoenix that I am staking out my position early, and publicly. I have simply come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as having too much information at one’s fingertips — or at least too much to be able to see the forest for the trees.
After all, what I remember most about election week 2020 is not the knowledge I gleaned about the partisan valence of certain forms of voting or the suburban counties that represented the electorate’s split, knowledge that appears to be outdated anyway just one cycle later. It is the feeling of anxiety stoked by the constant throws to Kornacki or King at each incremental release of results, close in affect to compulsively refreshing social media during a mass shooting or natural disaster. What in the aggregate would have been a way of following the story, keeping abreast of events, doing my part as a well-informed citizen tipped over into addictive, unhealthy behavior. It might even have been counterproductive: As an editor, I regularly caution writers about the pitfalls of over-reporting, in which the proliferation of detail can cloud understanding as opposed to create it.
This is not, mind you, the fault of the chartthrobs themselves. They are tasked with reporting and analyzing the data as it becomes available to them, and I have no doubt that they will do it with the same aplomb this cycle as they did the last. The problem is the incentivization mechanism that leads media platforms, whether Instagram, Netflix or CNN, to serve users only that which they are algorithmically likely to want, in quantities that far exceed what is necessary for entertainment or enlightenment. This time around, the networks are actively leaning into the chartthrobs phenomenon in an attempt to attract, or perhaps entrap, audiences: MSNBC’s “Kornacki Cam” will form a dedicated election night livestream on Peacock as part of the platform’s Olympics-inspired “multiview” programming, while John King’s “magic wall” will be available to users of CNN’s news app.
Times staffers look back on election week 2020, from the rise of the ‘chartthrobs’ to the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle, to understand what to expect this time around.
Arguably, most viewers of real-time election coverage are the age of majority, and can be trusted to choose for themselves in prime time as well as at the ballot box. In actuality, if the hyper-polarization of American politics and the growing discourse around social media’s habit-forming tendencies are any indication, we politics nerds are no more prepared to set limits without structural support than the teenagers attached to their smartphones in the recent docuseries “Social Studies.” The chartthrob fixation, in 2020 and now, is just TikTok for people on the cusp of a midlife crisis: an obsession that seems harmless until you find yourself at the bottom of the rabbit hole somewhere around 3 a.m.
If we, the media, are to break our own habitual preference for horse-race narratives over policy analysis, for predicting the outcome instead of reporting what it will mean for our communities, we will first need to stop the gamification of elections that we’ve trained consumers of media to expect. And though it may not be traumatizing, like the New York Times’ needle, or misleading, like election-betting markets, the chartthrobs’ increasing prominence in election coverage nonetheless reflects similar propensities. Which is why, this election week, I’m considering my counterprogramming options — with periodic check-ins on Kornacki, King, et al., to see where the count stands.
Theirs may be a horse race of inches, but it is a horse race nonetheless.
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