5 November, 2020: A View from Abroad

It’s a long, cliff-hanging election, and there’s not a lot of news to report while votes are being counted, so news outlets are more or less vamping. I don’t know exactly how they are vamping in the US, but here in England, they are vamping by interviewing pretty much anybody with knowledge or, in a pinch, anyone with an opinion. 

Some are election officials, and as a group, those folks are doing a stellar job of being calm and reasonable.  

Calm and reason – as we all know – are not compelling to your average viewer. So they need to punch it up a bit, which involves interviewing “ordinary” Americans.

I listen to the BBC News Hour at home sometimes, mainly for the sheer pleasure of saying, “Nyews Aaah” at the top of the broadcast. I really like saying “Nyews Aah,” as opposed to “Noos Ourrrr.” Every single time, they say, “This is the BBC Nyews Aah,” and I echo, “Nyews Aah!!!!”

It’s satisfying.

Also, I like listening to news that acknowledges the rest of the globe.

But here, I’m not listening to the Nyews Aah, I’m listening to the BBC. And it’s maddening. They call Pennsylvania “P’vania.”  NO. They are catastrophizing.  But that’s not the big thing. The big thing is the choice of ordinary Americans. They’ve found the oddest of oddballs. It’s as if someone came to your place of work to ask how things are going, and they decided to interview Tyler. Of all people. It’s outlier time!

It’s nothing new, really. Since the summer, reports about Portland have been slanted towards the whole “anarchist jurisdiction” story, suggesting the entire metropolitan region is in flames. It was hard to be in Portland, saying NO to national coverage. But it’s harder, somehow, to be away from home, saying NO to British coverage of the US. We are a difficult nation with a weird process, but we are not all Tyler, for pity’s sake.

On the plus side, a pundit just  said, “I’m not going to hypothecate.”  That was nice. And Trump was described as “mercurial.” So there are some small gifts in the garbage.

Okay, they have finally moved on to discussing UK Nyews, and started interviewing Londoners who went out last night to party, before entering four weeks of lockdown. I can drop my shoulders an inch or two. And they did find some truly goofball partiers. Of course, those people are representative of all ordinary Britons.