The broadcast-news business used to follow Otto von Bismarck’s advice about making laws — as with sausage, it’s best not to see what goes into making it.
In recent years, however, a number of factors have conspired to make the networks’ coverage of politics a more improvisational, laid-bare affair: closer contests and, therefore, longer nights; more electronic gadgetry at the disposal of anchors and analysts; and the influence of the blogosphere, which has made TV safe for unprecedented levels of wonkery.
On CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, laptop computers have become required accessories to the pinstripes and pantsuits. There are more talking heads than ever, to the point that pundit panels often resemble telethon phone banks. In addition, to accommodate both the bodies and the digital trappings, newsrooms have taken on the sleek, vaulted look of refurbished modern lofts.
More space exposure has led to coverage that’s more kinetic: Anchors are no longer tethered to their desks; they prowl the newsroom.
Leggy Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has patented a background-to-foreground approach to the camera, chitchatting as she makes her way down the studio ramp. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper stand and chat with panelists as though they’re at the office water cooler.
“It was clearly our intent to ramp up and put some life in our election coverage,” says David Bohrman, senior vice president and Washington bureau chief of CNN. “We want to provide this interesting swirl of opinion instead of three guys in a dark room, which is what television had historically done.”
Mr. Bohrman, a 30-year veteran of TV news, says CNN began exploring a new election-coverage aesthetic in 2004, when it broadcast presidential election results from NASDAQ’s MarketSite studio, with its giant 96-screen video wall.
The experiment was so successful, Mr. Bohrman says, that the network built its own “liquid wall” at its New York City studio in Time Warner Center. The massive screen — which can convey raw vote totals, exit-poll breakdowns, maps and other graphical information — is the signature backdrop of CNN’s Election Center.
“It had been something I wanted to do for years,” Mr. Bohrman says. “I wanted this big, dynamic room where we’d be able to toggle between individual tote boards and be able to transform it at the snap of a finger to a wall full of live remotes.”
Mr. Blitzer says he was skeptical initially in 2004 of Mr. Bohrman’s vision of deluging viewers with data while network analysts were still processing it.
“To my amazement, it worked really well,” he says. “I think we’ve created a trend that other news organizations are copying. It has an energy that our viewers like because they feel like they’re in the newsroom with us.”
At Fox News Channel, anchor Bill Hemmer interacts with a similarly designed touch-sensitive screen dubbed the “Bill Board.”
Simultaneously with the increasing technological slickness of election coverage has come a sharpening of human-scale elements, such as what presidential-aide-turned-Fox-News-contributor Karl Rove has called “back-of-the-napkin” number-crunching.
In an election cycle that, at least for Democrats, has seen a long string of contests play out with excruciating irresolution, the networks’ resident brainiacs will routinely scribble, or “telestrate,” arithmetical calculations on-screen in the style of football broadcaster John Madden.
Each network boasts its electoral savants: John King at CNN, Chuck Todd at MSNBC, and Mr. Rove and Michael Barone at Fox News. The latter, the co-author of National Journal’s Almanac of American Politics, has visited — and has a disturbingly minute knowledge of — every congressional district in the country.
When they’re not piloting fancy new touch-screen gadgets, they’re … talking, speculating, cogitating.
In the coverage of modern politics, there are, quite simply, more hours to burn. Congressional and presidential elections often turn on razor-thin margins, and, since the 2000 election-night debacle, networks have become more cautious about projecting winners.
News networks are acutely aware, too, of the scrutiny of their coverage that takes place on a minute-by-minute basis in the blogosphere. In response, with their laptops and viewer e-mail at hand, they have embraced the real-time methodology of blogging, as well as bloggers themselves.
On election night in 2006, CNN hosted a party for bloggers at the Adams Morgan coffee bar Tryst, and Fox News regularly features blogger correspondents from a news desk it calls “Blogitics.”
The co-optation of blogs, more generally, is a reflection of the way viewers consume news: in a whirl of activity that includes both television and the Internet. On-air anchors routinely urge viewers to scan the networks’ growing online content.
Television networks have long taken into account audiences’ ability to channel-surf. The new face of election coverage is an acknowledgment of a new ability — call it medium-surfing.
“We assume that an awful lot of people are dabbling in the Web while they’re watching us,” Mr. Bohrman says. “In fact, they might be dabbling in us.”
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