I just love having real votes coming in. Speculation and polls are not that interesting in the last couple of weeks of that election. The worst time is from 4-7 p.m. when you’re waiting for the votes. That really sucks, if I’m being honest! I will say that patience is what we need. It’s going to be a long week, and this is a way closer race than it was in 2020. It took us until Saturday to call that election! So just remember to have some patience; take some deep breaths, get in your bubble bath and have your glass of wine ready.
Stelter on reporting through nearly 10 years of the Trump era
It’s going to make more sense to our children; they will be able to explain this period in time very clearly in a way that it’s hard to do when you’re living through it. It’ll make a lot of sense to our kids how the backlash to a diversifying country within white America, and the prevalence of smartphones and the internet giving everybody the ability to invent their own reality at any given time was so destabilizing to our society. We just assume this is the way it is now, but the next generation will be able to see more clearly the factors that are going into this.
Stelter on how CNN distinguishes itself from Fox News
Especially since the Dominion case, I think it’s pretty clear what Fox is: A big [opinion] operation with a small news operation. Next week, they’ve got a great decision desk led by Arnon Mishkin, the same man who accurately called the 2020 race. So they have a trustworthy operation when it comes to the election, but whether they will let that truth be loud in the days thereafter is really the question about Fox. CNN is just fundamentally a different brand… we emphasize the word “news.” That’s why I’m so excited to be back at CNN, because the news muscles of the place are sometimes underappreciated, but are also the most important part of the network.
Phillip on “subclipping mafia” outlets like Acyn
We call them the clippers. They sit around every night and watch cable more closely than cable watches cable, and they clip everything. It’s happening on the left, and it’s happening on the right. They are clipping for a certain partisan narrative and that drives outrage in a certain direction that relies on things being taken out of context… and context matters. I work at a television network, so I can go back to the feed, but most people can’t.
I do think it’s reinforcing the relevance of television, because the thing you’re outraged about on the internet is coming from TV. But it has the ability to really distort peoples’ worldviews, and we have to give people better tools to navigate that. Maybe that’s on us in the news media to be a more even-handed version of what we do and put the clips in their appropriate contexts. We’re just not as fast! Every five seconds, they’ve got something going up.
