You knew that in the end, someone on talk TV would be carried out kicking and screaming.
Around 11:30 Tuesday night, moments after his own Fox News Channel declared Barack Obama had been re-elected, Fox News analyst Karl Rove stomped his feet and said no, no, no, it’s not over. It can’t be.
Fox News Channel had actually delayed making that announcement itself. At 11:15, when MSNBC’s hosts were announcing and celebrating Obama’s re-election, Fox News was still insisting Obama had only 244 electoral votes, 26 short of re-election.
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In fact, the presidential election of 2011-2012 provided so much fodder for cable news channels, especially Fox News and MSNBC, that it’s no wonder Rove didn’t want it to be over.
Fox News even drew out the final moments with an improv drama in which coanchor Megyn Kelly led a camera crew back to the “decision room” for an explanation of the call.
That provided a final flourish for a night on which all networks — cable as well as broadcast — had generally played it safe.
Anchors and networks were very careful not to say anything they might have to retract, because only Al Gore has worse memories of Florida 2000 than the major broadcast networks.
If the networks were conservative in vote projections, though, NBC and ABC were downright festive in their decorations.
NBC felt such an afterglow from the summer Olympics that it recreated the look of the closing ceremonies in Rockefeller Plaza, renamed Democracy Plaza.
ABC’s studio – which suffered an unacknowledged power failure for about 15 minutes at 11 p.m. — featured a circular map that looked like a giant trampoline.
ABC clearly equated the size and bold coloring of the set with the gravity of its message — in contrast to old-school CBS, where anchor Scott Pelley conveyed the same information without the sense that the analysts needed megaphones to communicate with each other.
But viewers who wanted a truly different take on analysis did have that choice: On upstart Current, half the screen was devoted to viewer tweets. Now that’s a true democracy plaza.
