You can look at the numbers a variety of ways, but there does seem to be more enthusiasm for American Idol than for the Presidential Elections.
Total Number of Votes cast in the 2004 Presidential Election = 122 million
Total Number of Votes cast in American Idol = 609 million
American Idol does let people vote more than once. There's no way of knowing how many votes would be cast for president if people could vote more than once. Also, to be fair the American Idol tally is over the course of the entire season. So for a somewhat more fair comparison you could add in the votes for the Presidential primary. Turnout in the 2004 Presidential primary would have varied state to state, but tends to be lower than the actual election. The off-year election of 2002 had a turnout of 39%. So if we estimate the primary as comparable to an off-year election with 39% turnout that would be approximately an extra 78 million votes. Which would bring the total Presidential votes up to 200 million. Still 1/3 of the 600 million votes cast for American Idol.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
American Idol vs. The President
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
2nd Republican Debate Available Online
The 2nd Republican Debate was in South Carolina on May 15, 2007. It was sponsored by Fox News Channel and is available online here:
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Monday, April 30, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Featured unregistered voter: Heather
Heather was in our Voter Registratoin Ads at VH1 in 2004. She wasn't registered at the time I met her. I followed up with her to see what has happened since:
On the 2004 Election:
By the time that the ad taped I had registered and actually what happened was weird.
I registered to vote at Sephora, and then when I went to the polls they didn’t have my name on the list - so they said there was a form I could fill out. I actually got a form a couple weeks later –but they said “your vote didn’t count”, which I thought was ironic. The registration hadn’t gone through or something. I voted for Kerry , and Kerry won in
So I guess that’s it.
I’m going to be an English teacher, so I care about politics, but I kind of just forgot about it. I'm from Connecticut and there was a lot going on last summer with Ned Lamont and Lieberman. I just had whatever going on at school, and it sort of slipped my mind. I’d like to be involved in local elections, but with school and working I sort of forget about that - and not being a native New Yorker, I don’t feel attached – I don’t know all the local politics in
I understand why people feel their votes don’t count. Going into education – I notice how little funding education gets – in Bushwick when I was teaching we didn’t have enough books, the facility felt like a prison... There’s schools on Long Island that have thousands more dollars per student – it’s really sad and it feels like it’s not a concern that gets seriously addressed by politicians. They give it lip service – like "No Child Left Behind" but it’s not genuinely doing anything to help the students.
It’s ironic that Bush doesn’t want to set deadlines for
No – I’m going to register as soon as I move back to
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
DC voting rights clears a hurdle
The House voted on thursday to give DC voting rights along with a new representative from Repulican-leaning Utah. Challenges ahead: A dubious reception in the Senate, a threatened presidential veto, and claims that the law is unconstitutional because the district is not a state:
"Opponents of the legislation pointed to Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, which says members of the House should be chosen 'by the people of the several states.' "
Why does Eleanor Holmes Norton wanna vote anyway? Everyone knows voting is for sissies, and she's no sissy. Did you see her on Stephen Colbert when he told her he didn't know if he was white? She assured him that he was white.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Responsibility of the Media
Received this letter as a forward from a friend. Working in TV and film I try not to land on projects that are violent, or exploit violence, but it's difficult because so much of production includes or relies on violent themes from the news to features and shows. I wish that more people would express this point of view to media execs - or vote with their remotes and their feet away from violent programming.
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 11:20 PM
To: Nightly@NBC.com
Subject: Regarding your recent decisions
Dear Mr. Williams:
I feel that full disclosure of my emotional involvement in this matter is warranted before I discuss my problems with your recent actions.
My name is David Markle, and I am a Virginia Tech Class of 1998 graduate in Computer Engineering. Both my brother and my sister are also Tech graduates. One of my brother’s professors and my sister’s sorority sister were both murdered this week. I and a great many of my friends had classes in Norris Hall, so this all hits quite close to home for me. This being said, I hope you will not take my comments as a purely emotional response to last night’s broadcast.
I am going to try to explain to you why I, as well as many others, find your recent airings and web postings of the murderer’s publicity materials so upsetting.
The murderer sent you his package for the express purpose of you broadcasting it. With your broadcast and web postings, you dutifully fulfilled his wishes. You have sent a message to current and future psychotic individuals that the way to get their message to the world is to cause as much mayhem as possible, and that this behavior will be rewarded with your compliance with their wishes. Your action, more than anything else I have seen after this tragedy, greatly increases the danger of an act like this recurring. You need look no further than the contents of the messages you received to know this – the killer’s references to the Colorado murders of a few years ago validates the idea that extreme attention paid to murderers will inspire other unstable individuals to commit similar acts.
In your “vlog”, you mentioned how conflicted you were, and how newsworthy these materials were before you published them for the world to see. Let me ask you this question: wouldn’t it be newsworthy if, on June 5, 1944, NBC news learned that the Allies were to land at Normandy instead of Calais? You and I both know that although the answer to that question is “yes”, your duty as Americans would have prevented you from disclosing that information. Your duty as a human being and as an American is no less clear in this matter.
No doubt some may compare your actions to those of the Washington Post in 1995 when they printed the manifesto of the Unabomber. In that case, the Post did so with the consultation of law enforcement, and as we all know, it led to Ted Kaczynski’s subsequent arrest. Your actions were conducted unilaterally, and after any good could have possibly come from them.
The news media in the 20th and 21st centuries has become a very powerful instrument in affecting change in the world. Terrorist ideologies are spread by it and sometimes wars are started using it. We don’t need you to add incitement of the criminally insane to the list. But please don’t apologize to me, to the families of the murdered, or to the wounded. Save your apologies for the victims that are yet to come.
Sincerely,
David Markle
