Election Night: Whiteboards Out, Holograms In

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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