ELECTION 2008: Covering the coverage

It's morning in America, and the tubes are dripping with tasty election coverage. As a news lady, my favorite kind of this post-decision reporting is meta: stories about the way other folks told the story. So I was pretty happy to wake up to these two pieces:

- Best Week Ever's daily Best Night Ever video, which today makes fun of the ridiculous use of charts, graphics, and "holograms" in the coverage:

Best Night Ever: 11-4-08 @ Yahoo! Video

- A Salon article on how the conservative crew at Fox News handled the election. It was interesting to see Fox News next to CNN on the bar TVs last night - the former was much quicker to call states, red or blue. We didn't have the sound on, but it looks like they spent the evening gearing up for an Obama administration:

From the beginning of the Fox election broadcast at 6 p.m., it was brutally clear that Hume and Shep Smith and Chris Wallace and all their guests and commentators had seen the exit-polling data and were not laboring under the delusion that those numbers reflected some 2004-style miscalculation. Sure, earlier in the day the network had ventilated a certain amount of unfounded racist paranoia, endlessly repeating some footage of a surly-looking fellow outside a polling place in Philadelphia who apparently represented the leading edge of a massive "Black Panther" conspiracy to intimidate white voters. (I guess it worked!)

But in general, the Fox team displayed an oddly jolly professionalism. They seemed determined to take their medicine, with the stick-to-itiveness of a losing football team dreaming of bright days far in the future or the past (and the near certainty that their core audience was going to bed, by the millions, in despair). Though it went briefly wobbly on Ohio, Fox didn't really show any particular reluctance to call states for Obama, and after New Hampshire (at 8:11) and Pennsylvania (at 8:30), its commentators quit pretending there was any serious doubt about the outcome and began arguing about what kind of president Obama would be -- and what kind of country he was inheriting from you-know-who.

Make sure you click to the second page to watch Juan Williams choke up a little.

And as I dug into my blog breakfast, I found these tasty links: Newseum's roundup of today's front pages and a big collection of editorial cartoons on the Obama victory. (After seeing those cartoons, I realized I never knew what we had in Jim Borgman until it was gone. some of them are just godawful.)