Flashback: CNN Used Cheap Gimmick for Views in Obama Election
CNN bills itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News.” A more accurate assessment might be “the most gimmicky for views.”
For the past 10 years, in lieu of in-depth reporting or anything of that nature, CNN has often relied on technological gadgetry to draw viewers.
And it all really kicked off, to a certain extent, on the night of Barack Obama’s election.
Back in 2008, as Obama defeated John McCain to become America’s 44th president, Obama was in Chicago, ready to celebrate in his hometown. So was CNN’s Jessica Yellin, although she was also present in the CNN studio through, um, an odd technological “advancement”:
You’re our only hope, Wolf Blitzer!
“There are 35 high-definition cameras ringing me, in a ring around me, I’m in the center, and they shoot my body in different angles and I’m told that transmits what looks like an entire body image back to New York,” Yellin told the audience at the time.
“I’m told that these cameras ‘talk’ to the cameras in New York so they know to move when the cameras in New York move.”
As Live Science points out, CNN’s “special effect is not a hologram. A true hologram is a technique that gathers laser light scattered from an object, and then presents it in a way that appears truly three-dimensional.”
You know, like Tupac on stage at Coachella. But it’s fascinating seeing a news outlet trying to emulate that sort of thing.
It wasn’t the only time this happened, however. For the 2012 election, CNN commandeered the Empire State Building so it could project the electoral votes and the winner on the side.
Remember this?
And then there was the “virtual Senate,” which CNN used to track the election for the upper chamber.
Unfortunately, this just made the whole thing look like a cheap Dreamcast game.
You haven’t really seen the “hologram” or the “virtual Senate” lately, although the whole projecting electoral votes on the sides of buildings has been picked up by other networks (sadly).
However, if there’s one thing that we know, it’s that the most trusted name in gimmicks will come up with something just as ridiculous and tacky in the future.
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