Election Night: Whiteboards Out, Holograms In

On election night, the networks spent a valiant couple of hours attempting to avoid reporting the news. That news, after they had called Ohio for Barack Obama around 9:20 p.m. E.T., cutting off any path to victory for John McCain, was that the election was over and Obama was the next President of the United States. But until 11:00:01 p.m. E.T., the press discussed how Obama might govern if he won, without directly saying that, oh, right–he had.

There was a practical and ethical reason for journalists’ shyness. The West Coast had not yet finished voting, and the TV networks have followed the policy of not calling the election before the polls close since 1980, when Reagan’s victory was announced just after 8 p.m. E.T. and voters walked away from polling places out west.

Recent elections had obliged by actually being close. But this time, the pundits had to speak in a subtle code, saying what they knew without saying what they knew. “Everybody check my math,” Keith Olbermann asked the MSNBC panel, defying them to say which state could get McCain to 270 electoral votes. Liberal bastion California? Obama’s home state, Hawaii? “You have a jeweler’s eye,” Chris Matthews told him slyly.

But besides the voters of L.A., there was another, more sentimental reason to hang on. The election was the greatest show TV has seen in years; it brought big ratings and restored, for a while, big political news bureaus’ sense of importance. And now it was going to come to an end. How could the networks possibly say goodbye? How could they make the moment last a little longer?

One answer: special effects! Election night captured in miniature the brilliance and ridiculousness of election 2008 in the media. NBC painted an electoral map on New York City’s Rockefeller Center skating rink and stood its hosts in front of enough virtual Greek columns to stage a hundred Obama rallies; 3-D graphics sprouted out of studio floors and hung in the air; and CNN unveiled the most amazing and goofy innovation, 3-D projections of studio guests speaking to the network’s anchors like Princess Leia asking Obi-Wan for help in Star Wars. Anderson Cooper ended an interview with singer and Obama supporter Will.i.am, “Appreciate you being with us tonight by hologram.” It was as if CNN had been bought by Lucasfilm.

The mind reels at how news organizations might employ this technology in the future. Will we see holograms of reporters standing outside in hurricanes?

On the other hand, election night also showcased how TV has successfully used technology to explain complicated subjects. Most networks employed some version of the “magic wall,” a video screen that displayed election returns granularly, down to the county level. Whooshing and zooming across and into the map, hosts were able to bore into America, identifying the microgroups that would decide the election and the demographic shifts in a contest that defied the old boundaries.

Still, with one network set after another looking like the sales floor of a Circuit City, it seemed as though the networks were trying to buy gravitas with high-tech gadgets. The screens dripped data–a list of states running down the side, graphics spanning the bottom, a “virtual Senate” materializing on CNN. Even the pundits metastasized: the networks had banks upon banks of them, lined up like operators at a telethon. Look at all this information! the screens screamed. Look at all this analysis! Never mind that we’re sitting on the news!

There was, in all this bluster and techno-wizardry, a feeling of overcompensation. Call it the Russert Deficit. Meet the Press’s Tim Russert, who died just before the general election got under way, ruled nights like this, breaking down the Electoral College John Henry–style, not with a giant touchscreen, but with a dry-erase marker and a whiteboard. At the end of the Democratic primary season, Russert did what nobody had the force to do on election night: call the game over when it plainly was.

At one point, NBC political director Chuck Todd scribbled on a “virtual whiteboard” in a kind of tribute, wondering what Russert would have said about the night’s results. Todd and a few others still use math and reporting to crack the electoral code as Russert did. But they don’t have Russert’s authority.

That’s probably less a judgment on TV’s personalities than a sign of its times. A fragmented media may simply be past the era of Russerts and Cronkites. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As the glitter of the long-planned electionpalooza settled to earth, there remained a disastrous econ0my, energy and climate crises and far-flung wars. And understanding them will take more than big stars and Jedi effects.

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