| Election night coverage | | Date Created: Nov 09, 2004, 11:28 AM |
 Presidential elections are always big for television news. Even bigger this time because the nets needed to overcome the disaster that was the 2000 election. This time around most of the television networks (unlike the bloggers) were cautious, hesitating before "calling" states for a particular candidate. CBS, in particular was cautious, given what its reputation with the Republicans. The exception was Fox, which was first to call states for Bush -- even calling Ohio for Bush on election night, while everyone else waited until Wednesday. Luckily for FNC, they were right.
The Washington Post actually kept track of all this, providing a chart so you can find out which network called which state at what time.
Lots was made of NBC's election set, "Democracy Plaza." The network went all out, in part to give Tom Brokaw a hero's send-off. While it was probably quite grand in person, it really didn't make me swallow my bubblegum watching it on the tube. Maybe they needed to have the Radio City Rockettes on ice skates to change the colors of their map. |
| Tim Russert did upgrade his whiteboard, however. You might remember the little white board he used to illustrate the Electoral College count in the 2000 election. Despite all the technology we use in television, it was this little board that gained attention in that election. He actually had two of them -- one he gave to the Smithsonion. The other, he wrote in his book Big Russ and Me, he gave to his son, Luke. |
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 I was much more impressed with CNN's set, which was the Nasdaq video display in Times Square. What a cool idea. Jon Stewart later joked that it looked like a sale at Circuit City, and I suppose it did. And there were times when video sources didn't come up on time, but for the most part it was pretty slick.
I did weary of Wolf Blitzer and I was already sick of the Crossfire gang. |
 For my part, I had a great time keeping an eye on the Electoral College for KBYU's broadcast.
We had our students working on the broadcast, alongside political science students. They all did a great job!
And we'll do it all again in four years. Until then, best read Steve Safrin's election humorous postmortem. |
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