Election Night Hangovers
I work for a local news station. We were live last night– election night– until midnight. This is, obviously, not unheard of in the world of television news. I didn’t get home from work until well after 2am. The first thing I did was watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report’s special “Midterm Midtacular” on my DVR. The Daily Show side was mostly funny, but the Colbert Report half was nothing shy of brilliant.
After watching, I flipped around the cable-news channels a bit to see what was happening at 3:30 AM in the land of über-news. All three networks, FOX, MSNBC, and CNN, were live. This is not a surprise as there are still two senate races that are too close to call. What was interesting was that MSNBC still had the “A” team on the set. Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, Bob Shrum, etc, all sitting at a desk commenting on what I can only assume they had been commenting since yesterday morning (fact: I watched Buchanan and Shrum in the exact same positions talking with Joe Scarborough yesterday afternoon around 2). Keith Olberman had been on set as late as 2:30 AM. The obvious question: “Why?”
Sure, on the west coast, the time would be just after midnight, but who cares? There gets to be a point in these races where you reach a deadlock and simply need to give things a day or two to sort themselves out. There isn’t a reason to keep your top talent on the set for that long, especially if you’d like to use them the next morning, or at the very least the next day.
EXCEPT!
If you’re MSNBC and you’re the third ranked cable-news channel you can show up the competition by claiming that you delivered the most comprehensive coverage. One has to assume that the only person watching election results at three in the morning are the die-hards and television bloggers, and seeing familiar faces at such an ungodly hour would definitely keep you watching and might even win you over the next time you’re looking for information. It’s kind of an interesting political maneuver in their own right.
None of this answers the real quesiton of the night, “why do we need all of this coverage anyway?” Have we really learning anything that we couldn’t have just found out in the morning?
On a related plane, at what point does CNN’s election night set get its own AI, revolt and then reek havoc on greater Atlanta?
November 8th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
I spontaneously cheered when Tim Russert broke out his dry-erase board last night. And wasn’t Williams-Brokaw-Russert-Brown the A-team? Or were they like the super-A-team?
November 8th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
On MSNBC, or on NBC? If the former, then yes. I guess my point was that no other network had ANY recognizable faces on the air at 3:30 in the morning.
November 8th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
We had Louis Dodly!
November 10th, 2006 at 7:09 am
As someone who was watching the coverage until everything that was going to be decided for the night was decided, I have to say that there was nothing more unappealing then when CNN stopped there intensive coverage and switched over to normal anchors at the desk (anchors who obviously knew little about what they were talking about, and pretty much just directly read off of prompter). Big Kudos to Chris Matthews who must have been on the air pretty much all day and all night. Up until the end I would have given the definite edge in comprehensive coverage to CNN, they were really pretty much on top of everything . . . while MSNBC seemed like they were only really able to focus on what was happening in the Senate races. However, it is really David vs. Goliath in this case, since CNN obviously had a much larger political unit and alot more money to spend on new technoligies, statistics software, etc. (vs the currently downsizing MSNBC). I can’t comment on FOX New’s coverage . . . because well I don’t watch Fox News.