Into the Streets

SINCE the early morning of Wednesday, November 8, I have preferred to watch television with the sound off. This is not quite so isolating as one might think. In the first place, all of the cable news networks have adopted the busy, Bloomberg terminal-type screen (news flashes crawling along the bottom of the screen, just above the drooping points of the anchor’s collar; “breaking news” blinking along the side, like a Hong Kong red-light district) so that even with the sound on “mute,” you can pretty much figure out what’s going on. And even with the sound on mute, and even though it breaks the relevant laws of physics and sound, you can somehow still hear Chris Matthews.

Without the distraction of actual sound, what you get is big-picture stuff—the human drama of a fluctuating vote count (usually in a box on the lower right of the screen, like a hockey score), the angry faces, the shouters and the screamers, the sticky, smelly exhaustion of the vote-counting room, Brit Hume’s dapper pocket square, the enormous pulsating face of Chris Matthews, itself a living barometer of the inflation and deflation of the past few weeks. Matthews’s face—its redness or whiteness, its bug-eyed embolism-ready tautness or its slack-mouthed heavy-lidded acceptance—delivers more real information about the state of the recount than all the fancy graphics and screen crawls put together.

About the Author

Rob Long

Rob Long is a writer and producer and a co-founder of Ricochet.

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Presidential Election

SINCE the early morning of Wednesday, November 8, I have preferred to watch television with the sound off. This is not quite so isolating as one might think. In the first place, all of the cable news networks have adopted the busy, Bloomberg terminal-type screen (news flashes crawling along the bottom of the screen, just above the drooping points of the anchor’s collar; “breaking news” blinking along the side, like a Hong Kong red-light district) so that even with the sound on “mute,” you can pretty much figure out what’s going on. And even with the sound on mute, and even though it breaks the relevant laws of physics and sound, you can somehow still hear Chris Matthews.

Without the distraction of actual sound, what you get is big-picture stuff—the human drama of a fluctuating vote count (usually in a box on the lower right of the screen, like a hockey score), the angry faces, the shouters and the screamers, the sticky, smelly exhaustion of the vote-counting room, Brit Hume’s dapper pocket square, the enormous pulsating face of Chris Matthews, itself a living barometer of the inflation and deflation of the past few weeks. Matthews’s face—its redness or whiteness, its bug-eyed embolism-ready tautness or its slack-mouthed heavy-lidded acceptance—delivers more real information about the state of the recount than all the fancy graphics and screen crawls put together.