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Sure enough, thats whats happened.
But the specific programming choices on CNN last night exacerbated it all.
Together, they created an Election Night experience that was strangely intimate and unnecessarily torturous.
There are three ways to think about the issues with CNNs election coverage, a.k.a.
its thumbscrew in the form of a newscast: the basics, the details, and the timeline.
This is fundamental Election Night coverage stuff, especially for cable news.
But it matters how you deploy the Magic Board.
On the other big cable channels,Steve Kornackiand Bill Hemmer were frequent but not constant figures.
The words and the imagery did not match.
But the biggest troubling detail was also the simplest.
A board where those states are left uncolored creates a very different impression: that theres still uncertainty.
The final fingernail-pulling flourish CNN put on the night has to do with its treatment of the nights timeline.
The logic is that change is exciting, and exciting makes for good TV.
But the reality is this yawning gap between CNNs horserace coverage (first Bidens ahead!
Can Biden squeak it out!)
But by then it was too late.
