Elections Are Better Now ? ?

Elections in the past were not that much different then they were in the past. The difference is not what we do it is just in how it is done. The people are the same. The difference is only in how we look at an election and how we see the results.
The first national election that I had a small part in was the Senatorial election involving Pierre E. G. Salinger (served in the US senate 1964 -1964) and George L. Murphy (served in the US senate from 1965 – 1971). It followed the appointment of Salinger to the senate to fill out an unexpired term and then ran for the next full term against former actor George Murphy. It was the typical election with much money being spent and personality becoming the biggest part of the election process. Let us just say that the only thing that George Murphy added to the history of the Senate was that he was an actor who won a national level office from California ahead of Ronald Regan. He showed President Regan that an actor could actually win a political race based on being able to read a script. Yes I still resent that the former press secretary to President John F. Kennedy was the looser even with the advantage of being an incumbent. So I may hold a grudge but I have used that anger to fight the good fight and have ended up on the loosing side a couple of times but always have felt that in the long run these elections have been a good fight.
The first election that I had the opportunity cover as a member of the press was actually while working for the “Fresno Bee” I was a copy cutter and ended up working on the local coverage that was a joint effort with the local NBC station KMJ-TV both were owned by Mc Clatchy and had their offices across the street from each other. The Bee newsroom was located on the third floor of the Bee building. The TV station had a building across the street. For the night of the coverage the TV station strung cable across the street for its studio cameras. They used the control room at the station and converted a part of the news room into a studio for the night. The count for each office was hand written on slips of paper and had to be changed each time that a new number was received. They started out with an artist from the art department doing the work but then it went to the copy department to do the work when the night became long and the art department had to get some rest so that they could do the next days newspaper. It was one of those elections that went on until early in the morning. The results were not known until the Today show the next morning. We spent a lot of time waiting for the network to break their coverage to give us the short time to insert our coverage. It was also the first time that I saw a law of television. It may take two days to set up in a location but only two hours to do the tear down. Today every station in the country has a computer that does fancy election graphics and most of the stations are connected via the Internet to the sources of the election results so that the count comes in directly and goes to the computer without needing the time consuming job of data input. The graphics on the national level have gotten so fancy that they have even changed the way that we discuss the election. Red states and Blue states were never a part of the language until the networks started to use those big maps and needed to differentiate the winners so that they would show up on the color sets that had become popular. It may be faster but it does not have the heart that the old election coverage had. It is just too personal.