What if a major national television station re-aired each debate a week before the election and publicized it? What if it ran opposite the Sinclair broadcast?
One can dream. It would be beneficial for the following reasons:
- less spin! People wouldn't be on the edge of their seats waiting for Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough to declare who won. It would be a relatively clean look at the candidates again, for the benefit of the still-undecided.
- of course, Kerry did measurably better than Bush and we would win new voters.
- whatever network aired it would probably score in the ratings. These were the most watched debates in recent history, right? I bet ratings for the reruns would be better than most normal programming and I don't see why they couldn't run commercials this time around. It might be better for the debates to be broken up, to give the audience a breather.
- knowing millions of people were watching Bush's 1st debate performance might cause Rove to lose a bit more sleep.
This is why we need the television equivalent of Air America. But maybe CSPAN could run it and we (Kerry supporters across the nation) could publicize it and convince our undecided/Libertarian/unmotivated-to-vote friends and acquaintances to watch.
Eh, just an idea that probably could never happen, but if Sinclair is going to air that bile, maybe a network would step up to the plate and counter-program biased programming with unbiased programming? I think it would work as a publicity stunt.
If there are networks that show Dharma and Greg reruns every day, why not rerun the most important broadcasts of the year just once?