Student reports from hectic BBC newsroom on election night in Washington

Author: Kevin Redmon

My day begins at 5:23 in the morning when Adi sends me a series of text messages. He's standing in the pre-dawn dark outside a Virginia polling place, trying to talk his way inside with a camera crew. He sounds a little disappointed that I'm not in the Bureau yet. As I pull on pants, I tell him that I am already on my bike, nearly there. He knows I'm lying.

Adi is my boss. He is an over-caffeinated Middlebury alumni of the 'manic genius' varietal. He has no semblance of a circadian rhythm, but, in his own panicked way, he does the daily work of three producers. A true Middlebury alumn, he layers long-underwear below his oxford and pairs wool socks with dress shoes. I work long hours for Adi; in return, he keeps me caffeinated and gives me the occasional cigarette. It is a very functional relationship.

Understand that the principal potential energy in the Washington, D.C. equation is naiveté, the bulk of which is supplied by interns. It's difficult to imagine oneself to be the next great American novelist while waving around a press badge with 'INTERN' emblazoned across the bottom. Mark Twain piloted river boats and mined for silver, but he sure as hell never had an internship. (I'm equally doubtful he ever asked a career services office for 'networking tips.')

I, conversely, am the embodiment of every intern cliché you have ever heard. I am very good at getting coffee. Pooja Shahani ('09) had this intern position before me, and I learned quickly that the most effective way to introduce myself in the Bureau was to skip my name and go straight to: "I'm the new Pooja." My credibility around here rides on her coattails.

Now, fourteen hours after I arrived for the day, the newsroom of the BBC's Washington Bureau is not unlike an eighteenth century British sanatorium-utter bedlam. The place has gone completely mental. Cigarettes, espresso, and toffee Nips are the only things keeping the wheels from coming off the whole operation. People like to argue about partisan bias in the media, but I promise you-at this point, most of the media is too burned out to care one way or another.

I am working the Results Desk. Unlike the American networks, which have platoons of analysts and pages of algorithms to aid them, we don't make projections in-house. Instead, we report what networks are reporting. Our exclusive use of the passive voice would horrify a high-school English teacher. It's not clear that the 'retract' function on our software works correctly, so we are very conservative with publishing official projections.

I am supposed to be watching CBS and NBC, and reporting their projections. However, wires got crossed somewhere-quite literally-so I am watching CBS and 24 Hour Doppler Radar instead. Our neo-Luddite technology bothers me until I see that the local CBS news anchors have been reduced to colouring in newspaper map with blue and red crayons and holding it up to the camera.

In half an hour's time, the first polls close; my middle school Latin teacher would refer to this moment as 'the excrement coming into contact with the cooling device.' I'm hoping for a trickle, but I fear a deluge. I'll out of the bureau sometime before dawn, stomach full of chemicals ending in -ine, heart full of renewed faith in American democracy.

The conventional wisdom in D.C. is that, depending on whether your horse wins or loses the race, you'll spend the night either pulling champagne straight from the bottle or ripping shots of bourbon until you're three sheets to the wind. Personally, I'll take a cup of decaffeinated coffee, this week's New Yorker, and a shot of Thorazine. It's less than eighteen hours until tomorrow's deadline.