I mean, really.
Local stations? Well, Channel 7 was hopeless — Amateur Hour stammering and utter lack of chemistry, dialog, or informativeness. The other locals were not much better. The results tickertaped at the bottom were rarely in any sort of coherent order. Way too many, “Visiting X Headquarters — John, what’s going on there?” “Well, people are cheering and standing around a lot here, Susan!” “Thanks, John!” interludes.
I would have appreciated at least some national coverage on the local stations It would have filled in between the local stuff.
National news was not much better. CNN and Wolf Blitzer had this humungo display board that (a) couldn’t be all viewed at one time, and (b) was usually blocked by Wolf Blitzer standing in front of it and talking about what we couldn’t see. Fox was predictably partisan — just short of “What sinister forces are going on behind the Republican defeats?”
The only coverage that didn’t have me grinding my teeth — half the time — was MSNBC. Keith Olberman was well-spoken, articulate, and, unlike most of what he usually gets quoted on, studiously non-partisan. His partner on screen was — well, I didn’t know the name, and didn’t find his picture easily on the MSNBC site, but he was a royal doofus. He had Margie yelling, “Bite me!” at the screen, for whatever that might tell you.
We usually watch TV news only on election nights, or in cases of disasters or other major crises. And Tuesday night didn’t do anything to change our minds.
Olbermann is da bomb. 🙂
Not only was the KMGH’s TV coverage teh suxx0r, their website had nothing useful on it…ever.
Not even this morning.
I had to go the the newspaper sites to get useful info.
Last night I had CNN’s election site running in background and checked on it while at the mission doors.
I had to really dig at the DenverPost.com site (after failing at the RockyMountainNews.com site) to find the basic voting tally page I cited for the ballot initiatives. I mean, WTF? That should be basic, raw info available off the front page, rather than having to sift through a slough of witty headlines and “Tight race in Umpteenth District” articles.
We stopped with the CoX around 9, anticipating that The Daily Show Midterm Midtacular would be on (since it was touted as 11p ET, 10p CT). Instead — reruns of TDS and Colbert. Followed by David Chapelle. Followed by …
The Daily Show new stuff was on at *midnight*. I hate Comcast. At least we DVRed it.
Meanwhile, we hung out on the couch and flipped back and forth between channels for as long as we could stand each one.
I was just about to ask why you didn’t check out the Daily Show. I don’t have cable TV, so I had to watch it on ComedyCentral.com this morning, but regardless I was howling with laughter. The segment was pure genius!
That’s wierd that Comcast didn’t air it till midnight. It was a live broadcast, so it should have been on for you guys at 10:00. Well I guess the important thing though is that you get the chance to watch it, even if not live.
I feel lucky. Our local coverage, which includes the four major networks plus the CW and our local independent station, was pretty good. I spent most of my time with the independent (which has some of the longest time local personnel) and CNN.
I’m not a big fan of any of the major networks anchors (I still can’t get used to Ms Couric doing hard news), so CNN was a good choice (although I did watch some MSNBC). Later on I listened to my local NPR station, which had both national and local coverage, and the least amount of listening to winner and losing politicians.
Let’s just say that the Southern California market is a bit more major of a league than the Denver metro area, so far as TV news talent goes.
CNN wasn’t bad, coverage-wise, but I wanted to see more charts and graphs and numbers, and they just didn’t stage manage it well.
NPR was probably a good idea.
Ahh…
Saw some MSNBC tape and the other guy was Tweety (AKA Chris Matthews) of Softball.
There is an Olbermann vid of the best of the evening I’ll be posting later.
I thought that might be him — but he looked about 40 lbs. heavier than his pics on the site.
The guy was a jerk, making stupid editorializing and asking leading/push questions. No secret about Olberman’s politics, but he kept himself in a neutral, journalistic mode all the time I watched (which impressed me a great deal).