2024-11-06 10:40:02
Depending on your perspective, the Kornacki Cam — viewable on Peacock, MSNBC’s website and YouTube — is either: an uneventful view of a wonky man working his ass off to analyze voter data or the greatest invention of the digital media era.
It’s also a complimentary counterpoint to Kornacki live on MSNBC, where he’s constantly clickety-clacking on the Big Board and showing us how bad things look out there. The Kornacki Cam, on the other hand, is, if not quite ASMR, certainly a calmer space in which to reside.
While it feels like the entire future of the country is embedded in every piece of data Kornacki extracts from that map, the Kornacki Cam is a place where literally nothing is happening. It’s super-casual, like watching election night results in a found-footage movie, or perhaps through a Ring doorbell.
Sometimes you only see the top of Kornacki’s head.
Sometimes — a lot of the time — you only get his back.
Sometimes he’s knocking back a beverage from his network-sanctioned mug.
Sometimes he’s on his phone and you can only see his elbow.
Sometimes he is missing entirely.
When the Kornacki Cam briefly lacks Kornacki, it’s as if MSNBC is encouraging us to ask important philosophical questions. Is the Kornacki Cam really a Kornacki Cam if Kornacki isn’t on it? Is an election really an election if the popular vote doesn’t matter? If any of what’s happening in this country even real, or will we all wake up tomorrow as if from a bad dream and realize we’re all being filmed for every minute of every day by our own personal Kornacki Cam? I mean, I doubt it, but I’d definitely prefer that to realizing Trump is going to be president again.
