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Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Tonight’s the night! What to expect on TV’s election results
Are you ready for some results? Barring a mind-blowing disaster, we will find out who our next president will be tonight — possibly as early as 7 p.m.
And millions upon millions of Americans will hear the “calling” of the election on TV. Nearly 65 million viewers watched election returns four years ago. If viewership for the 2008 primary elections and presidential debates are any indication, considerably more millions will be tuned in for tonight’s historic showdown between Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain.
All of the cable and broadcast news networks will be dancing around their “magic walls” by 6 p.m. (Central Time). At that very moment, polls will be closed in two battleground states — Indiana and Virginia. If both of those states fall for Obama in a big way, we’ll see the anchors, reporters and pundits begin to salivate over an early call for victory.
At 6:30 p.m., two more big battlegrounds end their voting — Ohio and North Carolina. If McCain takes both of those states, look for insecurity among the folks who previously were prepping for a winner to be announced early. And at 7 p.m., after Florida, Pennsylvania and Missouri wrap things up, the suspense will either be gripping or the end will be clear.
Low-tech fun like Tim Russert’s grease-board, upon which he scrawled “Florida! Florida! Florida!” in 2000 will be replaced by dazzling high-tech gizmos. CNN broke ground with the digital “magic wall” map in the early primaries and apparently is flirting with introducing 3-D holograms of reporters in the field being beamed into the New York studio.
ABC is taking over Times Square for its network coverage, while NBC, as it has done before, is home-based at Rockefeller Center, where the outside Plaza’s ice rink has been tansformed into a U.S. map.
As it was in 2004, the political executives at cable and network news divisions will be favoring accuracy over speed. Nobody wants to be caught calling a state before it’s actually been tabulated. Projections, as we found in 2000, can be deadly wrong. That means an official winner shouldn’t be called before the polls are closed in the West (10 p.m. our time), but if the tally becomes lopsided, it wouldn’t take a genius at home to make a personal call and pop open the bubbly.
You can either flip around, as I’ll be doing, or settle in with one source. Here’s the lineup of, by now, very familiar faces:
Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos on ABC
Brian Williams on NBC
Katie Couric on CBS
Jim Lehrer on PBS
Shepard Smith on Fox TV
Brit Hume and Chris Wallace on Fox News Channel
Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper and Campbell Brown on CNN
David Gregory, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC
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