Missouri’s Miserable Election Coverage

Being born and raised there, I’m usually pretty proud to tell people I’m from St. Louis.  However, after following the election coverage last night and looking back over the post-election news today, I must report that the coverage I saw was minimal, and really not all that impressive.  I followed the election news pretty closely last night on Twitter, and saw updates from all kinds of people and news organizations all across the country.  The Post-Dispatch (St. Louis’s one major newspaper) made all the same updates as other news sources, but often lagged far behind.  Like half an hour behind.  It seems to me that the only outlet moving slower was perhaps the New York Times; they, of course, were waiting to confirm everything with sources.  Since they’re still the leading newspaper in the country, it’s not really in their best interest to jump on breaking news too quickly, but rather to wait a little longer and make sure their information is correct.  However, if that’s what the Post-Dispatch was after, it seems like they would publish after the Times.  Instead, their tweets usually fell somewhere in between the first announcements and the Times, which makes them just seem…well, slow.

Looking at the articles posted on their web site, most look like they’re just re-posted from the AP  (that’s disappointing, sure, but not too surprising, at least to me.  Subscriptions have been declining for them for years, forcing them to make staff cuts, so they have had to turn more and more to pre-fab news stories from the wire).  The content leaves a little to be desired too – the first thing you see on the site is a slideshow of pictures of the Obama girls, so we can see how much they’ve grown up…

Aside from the Presidential election, the Senatorial race received considerable coverage, both in Missouri and nationally.  That had mostly to do with the controversy surrounding it after Todd Akin, now of internet fame, made his comments about ‘legitimate rape’, and then refused to drop out of the race.  Despite the coverage leading up to the election, which made the race sound razor close, Claire McCaskill defeated him 55-39%, what he called “a real skunking.”  And with that, Missouri politics will probably fade back into national obscurity…

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