Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2008 > March > 05 > Entry
Cable news networks call the winner … eventually
After trumpeting the do-or-die nature of Super Tuesday II for weeks, the broadcast networks elected to stick with regular programming last night.
Maybe they thought viewers might be sick of Texas and Ohio and the Barack vs. Hillary War. Or maybe they just didn’t think. Probably the latter …
Anyway, the coverage fell to the cable news networks, and throughout the evening, they were all dancing carefully around the Democratic primary contest between fruntrunner Barack Obama and steely challenger Hillary Clinton. Even when it looked like Ohio would go for Clinton in a landslide, the cable nets cautioned viewers that it was too soon to call because certain urban areas had not reported.
Ditto the results from Texas, which none of the pundits seemed capable of explaining. What was this odd primary-and-caucus system? Why can’t those Texans pick one or the other? CNN’s Anderson Cooper looked perplexed, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews giggled and spewed and Fox’s Brit Hume, when he wasn’t looking terminally bored, just sighed.
Both primaries turned out to be close, but Texas was such a nail-biter that caucus results were still inconclusive at midnight. Zzzzz. A girl’s got to get her beauty rest, you know?
With most of the news outlets getting data at the same time, there wasn’t much of a competition over who called which primary result first.
The biggest plus or minus, when it comes to viewers actually getting information, falls to the graphics. MSNBC rolled results through by party, rather than state: all of the Texas Republican results, all of the Ohio Republican results, all of the Rhode Island results, all of the Vermont results. Then … vice versa for the Democrats. This plan didn’t strike me as nearly as useful as running both parties’ tallies by state.
CNN and Fox used the state-by-state system, with CNN’s graphics a bit clearer than Fox’s — mostly because Fox, as usual, tried to put too much stuff up on the screen at once.
Everybody was careful to mention Republicans from time to time, even though John McCain’s official nomination status was never in doubt. Mike Huckabee’s gracious concession speech was carried in full by all of the cable networks, followed by McCain’s incredibly sincere and deeply boring reading from a TelePrompTer. If McCain doesn’t stop adding “my friends” to every line he delivers, he’s going to make us all go mad by November.
In terms of big contests, we’re finished with primary season until Pennsylvania on Apr. 22 — surely that one really will end the Hillary-Barack smackdown. Just be glad we don’t live and watch TV in Pennsylvania. If you thought ads went negative in Texas, imagine how much nastier they’re going to get in the next few weeks there.
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