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Beam Me Up, Wolfie! “[I]t wouldn’t have been television news without some bravura hype and aggressive flashiness. On CBS, Katie Couric (as calm and confident as she’s been at the anchor desk) hosted a sober presentation. Every other set looked like something you’d pick up at a Circuit City in Dubai. . . . But those gizmos—merely straightforward efforts to present data engagingly—were nothing compared with an embarrassing stunt that CNN first attempted in the 7 o’clock hour. Wolf Blitzer was in his New York command center standing 10 paces away from a 3-D rendering of a reporter: ‘Jessica Yellin via hologram in Chicago.’ The effects were such that she was ringed in an off-purple aura from head to toe (a distance, it seemed, of about 4 feet). This was distracting, perfectly superfluous, and in no way an advance on the good old two-dimensional Yellin to whom we are accustomed. This was just the latest example of CNN’s weakness for state-of-the-art technology that shows you little more than its state-of-the-artiness.”
—Troy Patterson, Slate television critic, Nov. 5, 2008. (Click here for full column.)
For more on Election Night TV gadgetry, see Wired online: For TV Networks, Election Is an Orgy of Gee-Whiz 3-D Tech.
And guess which network beat everybody else in the ratings?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/05/AR2008110504179.html
That's right CNN.
Was it the gimmicks or the fact that it was one of the few places you could get relatively unbiased news? Rest assured the others will be analyzing and trying to outdo CNN at least technologically from now on. Is that a good thing? Not for die hard reporting lovers like me who switched from CNN to Fox to MSNBC to ABC to CBS . . . you get the drift. I'm hoping they all try to balance their reporting as well as CNN did.
Good God... CBS couldn't get it right with its graphics and updates. I'm a former TV reporter and manager and my partner is a former TV news director. At the election party at our offices, we kept looking at Couric waiting for her to wince as completely erroneous figures kept popping up on their graphics. This was standard def.
ReplyDeleteIn the other room we were playing NBC in HD and they were loading in all these very smooth graphics in the extra 16x9 margins that SD viewers couldn't see. We were pretty impressed.
Have to disagree wholeheartedly with CBS's performance.
Oh and this Star-Trek-meets-punditry-Election-Night excess wasn't even the best part. Did anyone see the The Situation Room on Wednesday afternoon?
ReplyDeleteWolf Blitzer spent a good 5 minutes on how CNN won the rating battle. Very self-righteous, if you ask me. And wasn't there anything he could have been saying besides, "Hey, we're cool. Look at how cool we are."
Come on Wolf. Election Night was so historic, and you waste 5 minutes babbling about ratings? That's Keith Olbermann's job.
But it got even worse. They spent a whole segment showing how they did the hologram bull@#$%. A whole segment! Now I know most of those people at CNN had been awake for about 25 hours straight by then, and were running on a diet of hope and 5-Hour-Energy Shots, but are they really that delirious to think people care about the hologram technology? I'd rather see behind-the-scenes video of James Carville dancing and taunting Alex Castellanos. Now that would be newsworthy.