Gizmos, not early projections

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff

On election night eight years ago, Tim Russert’s dry-erase board on NBC became a potent symbol -- of the ever-changing nature of results that night, and of a journalist’s thrill at covering an astonishing unfolding story. (Dan Rather’s metaphors did the same, more surreally.)

It was tempting, tonight, to wax nostalgic for those days. On TV, election 2008 was a night of uncomfortable restraint. Clearly, many broadcasters, well-steeped in national polling data, were eager to talk early about the implications -- good or bad -- of the Obama victory that seemed to be taking shape. But the lessons of 2000 linger on. And so the networks replaced giddy projections with an arms race of gizmos.

CNN had its touch-screen electoral map, so symbolic of high-tech wizardry it was recently spoofed on “Saturday Night Live.” And there was more: CNN also brought us some strange holographic images of reporters at local events, plus and a stream of odd-shaped graphics that were meant to elucidate exit poll data, but wound up inducing headaches.

Fox News Channel, meanwhile, presented a graphic screen it called “The Launch Pad” -- anchor Brit Hume teased its operator, Megyn Kelly, that “that confirms it. You're very, very important.” NBC had a ”virtual reality electoral map studio,” in which some graphics rose from a replica of the presidential seal on the floor.

In many ways, the dry-erase board still seemed superior. For one, you had too look awfully hard at what the big bright boards were showing early in the evening to extract much meaning: the killer details were all in the fine print. As ever, the early reports were based on tiny percentages of the vote.

And all of that information and processing power didn't necessarly translate into reporting speed -- if speed remains an election-night value for anyone. Despite its avalanche of data, or possibly because of it, CNN was the slowest of the cable networks to call states. Campbell Brown kept preaching caution as if hewing to a yoga mantra.

MSNBC was giddier; it was the first of the cable networks to call Pennsylvania in Barack Obama's column. And well before polls closed, anchor Keith Olbermann was declaring that journalists in 2100 would be interviewing 2008 voters, by then elderly, about their votes cast for the first black president.

Though Fox was slower in some early states to call results, it did lead the pack in calling Ohio, and its panelists telegraphed their own predictions early on. Even before the network called Pennsylvania, Fox's Bill Kristol, also a conservative columnist for the New York Times, looked disconsolate. “This is going to be a bad night for Republicans, I think,” he said.

Across the dial, in the early hours, Republicans acted defeated, and often deflated. On ABC, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani looked subdued, even as he insisted that any McCain running mate would have earned Sarah Palin-style scrutiny. Diane Sawyer sounded apologetic when she countered that, nationwide, exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters thought Palin wasn’t qualified to be president. And Charlie Gibson seemed determined to cheer Giuliani up: “I have never seen such a bright Republican tie as you have,” he offered. When reporting caution is the mantra of the night, sometimes making nice just has to do.

But as the bad news for the GOP wore on, even CNN started waxing poetic about the worldwide implications of an Obama victory. When Jeffrey Toobin suggested that there was no historic precedent for the way the nation's image would change overnight, panelist William Bennett calmly pointed out that the end of World War II might count.