Election Night: Whiteboards Out, Holograms In

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Illustration by Francisco Caceres for TIME; Obama: AFP / Getty; Cooper: Getty

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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.