A Few Leaders Emerge in TV Coverage

As if to stoke Rather's tradition of dressing up facts and figures with such colloquial Texasisms, singer Kinky Friedman, running for governor of Texas as an independent, popped up on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show in the late afternoon and said of his campaign, "We're hanging in there like a hair in a biscuit." Asked by Carlson what Friedman's first official act would be should he win, the candidate said: "Light up a Cuban cigar with my old traffic tickets."

CNN and MSNBC aired political news all day, as did cable neighbor Fox News Channel. They managed to keep reporting news even when there was no news to report. Once NBC signed on for its hour of results at 10 p.m., its competition included corporate comrade MSNBC, and some of the same network personalities appeared on both.

With NBC undergoing draconian cutbacks and layoffs ordered by owner General Electric, it seemed odd for NBC and MSNBC to be fighting for the same viewers. MSNBC's coverage had its own personality, however, thanks mainly to insatiable political gourmand Chris Matthews, with such lesser lights from the network as Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough redundantly at his side.

Even Matthews had his gaffes. He spent 30 seconds framing a question for a member of the network's panel of assembled experts, only to discover that new panelists had moved in.

Neil Cavuto, who hosts a less-than-indispensable daily show on Fox, got into an on-air shouting match with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who understandably took exception when Cavuto kept interrupting him. In Cavuto's defense, Schumer seemed determined to talk as slowly and laboriously as possible, proving himself yet another Democrat who takes to television like a duck takes to oil.

The shining, gray-haired exception, of course, is Bill Clinton, whose appearances during the campaign inevitably, and sometimes spectacularly, livened things up. Unfortunately, he wasn't seen much on TV yesterday, except for perfunctory footage of him casting his ballot -- in Chappaqua, N.Y., with his wife.

Many an anchor or reporter seemed irked that he, like the public, would have to wait for genuine results before declaring winners. It used to be that to "call" an election meant to conclusively declare a winner based on counted votes as supplemented by exit polling. But now, when TV newzees say an election is "too close to call," they often mean too close to predict on the basis of exit polling alone.

Reporters were saying Monday night, 24 hours before the polls closed in many states, that certain elections were "too close to call." But of course, you're not supposed to "call" them a day ahead of time.

Similarly, one has to wonder how much the coverage affects the story when virtually everybody on every channel is parroting the same information. Day after day, TV journalists announced that the Democrats were all but certain to take control of the House and Senate -- largely because the Republicans were themselves divided over Iraq and over the competence of Bush, and thus were unlikely to turn out in large numbers.

How big a shock was it, then, when, in the final days before the election, Republican leaders and party faithful decided that having heard the same media message hundreds of times, maybe they'd defy the predictions, rally together and turn out in greater numbers than predicted? And perhaps even prevent the Democrats from taking the House or the Senate, thereby making pundit upon pundit look ridiculous?

Even if it accomplishes little else in the way of change, the midterm election did promote to genuine star status two fairly new and highly telegenic political figures: Rep. Harold Ford Jr., the Tennessee Democrat who failed in his bid for a Senate seat, and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who had a head start from the last Democratic convention. These two fresh faces help counter one negative image of Democrats on TV -- geezers peering over their spectacles, looking just this side of clueless.