To heck with a long boring blog entry about "What Verne Thought About Last Night's TV Coverage." Let's just go straight to my awards:
Special "What the Hell Happened? Award" goes to...Everybody, from CNN to name-a-TV-network. As someone with a glorious tradition of getting his predictions wrong (see: "Dancing with the Stars") I can really appreciate how easy it is to screw things up. But I don't employ thousands of high-paid journalists and polling staffs. The networks do and still managed to predict for days - confidently - that Obama would win.
"Yes, a lot of people have a lot of explaining and analysis to do," said Brian Williams on MSNBC. Forget it, Brian - why should anyone believe either?
Best Double talk Award: goes to...Again, I can't make up my mind, so I'll just have to give it to everyone again. It's truly amazing how TV types can be talking with such confidence about the expected outcome, and then - as the real numbers come in - manage to imply that, "oh yeah - we really knew this was gonna happen...!" A little while ago, Matt Lauer asked Tim Russert "what happened" with TV and the rest of the media's predictions. "Women, women, women [voters]," said Tim, as if he knew all along.
Best Comic Relief: To both Fox News and CNN. Yes, these two aren't known exactly for comic relief but last night they outdid themselves. Right up until just about a quarter to eleven, they refused to call the race for Hillary, insisting that they had to wait for college town returns to come in. (College returns???!! All the kids were too busy smoking bongs and updating their iTunes playlists to go out and vote yesterday. HELLO!!) Anyway, just as Obama came on stage to concede, they too conceded, giving the race to Hillary. MSNBC gave the race to Hillary about fifteen minutes earlier - but only after the Associated Press gave its own seal of approval.
The Best Use of Star Power by Any Candidate Award goes to...John Edwards. Yes, Mr. Third Place, whose handlers placed James Denton - or his identical twin brother, which I don't believe he has - directly behind the candidate as he conceded. I kept thinking, if there wasn't a writers strike, who else would be there? Chuck Norris?
The Why Bother Award goes to...CBS and NBC. Once again, they prove that they could give a damn about TV news any longer. During one of the biggest upsets in political history, they declined to break in from regular programming. They didn't even run crawls. I guess the ruling logic now is, "people who are watching 'People's Choice Awards' couldn't care less who won." They may be right - but what a shame they have to be so blatant about it. ABC did, in fact, break in at 9 with a special.