MagneticMediaFed

A spherical head

I suppose this is something of a holdover from Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, but I’ve been thinking about it since the AP called the race for Hillary Clinton. Let me set the scene: My roommate and I are watching MSNBC’s coverage because we’re both hopelessly addicted/in love to/with Tim Russert and I find Keith Olberman fine enough. We’re kind of doing that thing where we’re half watching the slowly creeping numbers of their various on-screen graphics and half making fun of everything on screen despite the fact that not-so-deep-down we clearly love all of this and don’t want it to end. Then the AP calls the race for Hillary Clinton and the night is ostensibly over. But instead of flipping off the television I flip back over to CNN to see what Wolf “They’re so black” Blitzer has to say about things. What they had to say was that CNN “was not prepared to call the race for Mrs. Clinton.” GAME ON! More after the jump…

(more…)

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?