one's on the left, one's on the right, and the other's gone to the MOOOOOON

[spatch]

All the news channels were able to call the election last night at 11:00 pm EST when enough of the the West Coast polls had closed.

MSNBC, the channel that gave us the bizarre sight of Pat Buchanan agreeing with Rachel Maddow, alternated between showing live shots of celebrations around the country (without anchor commentary, which was a nice touch) and shots of their own setup at Rockefeller Center of which they were very proud. They'd laid the electoral map out on the ice rink and even had gussied-up window-washing apparatuses, one for McCain and one for Obama, climbing up the side of 30 Rock for a giant electoral vote graph. It reminded me of a game from The Price Is Right.

On the other side of the spectrum, FoxNews only grudgingly showed brief pictures of people being satisfied with the election, and instead gave a lot of face time to two talking white guy heads who tried very hard to find some positive spin on the whole thing. They ended up discussing how relieved they were that the Democrats hadn't taken enough seats in Congress to keep the Republicans from filibustering. There was an attempt at gloating, but you could tell their hearts just weren't in it. They were able to find it in their hearts to start making fun of Joe Biden just after Obama's speech, so they didn't have to actually talk about the speech itself. Stay classy, FoxNews.

And then there was CNN, which had Anderson Cooper pretending that he was very excited to take part in a FIRST EVER TELEVISION FIRST EVER FIRST, which involved... talking to a hologram¹.

Uh, guys...

Guys?








1. Not a real hologram.

Comments

[annilita.livejournal.com]

Brit Hume on FoxNews blew my mind at one point, when right before the west coast closed, he started talking about how Obama was such a great guy and someone else who used to work there knew him in college and thought he was just a magnificent person and on and on and finally Juan Williams stepped in and started trying to pull him back to the talking points, but Hume was in this butt-kiss spiral that he couldn't pull out of.

It was awesome.

[bostonista.livejournal.com]

Really?! That's so great.

Someone posted that FoxNews switched over to Seinfeld right about around the time that McCain conceded. Which made me amused and sad at the same time.

[jp-land.livejournal.com]

I've actually kinda-sorta worked with Anderson Cooper. He's really not into bells and whistles, and he probably was laughing at the idiocy of it all when the camera wasn't on.

But you have to admit, it looked pretty cool. I was trying to figure out how they did it all.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I wanted the holograms to have little H's on their foreheads.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Yay!

Huh!

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

I'm outa luck, outa love
Gotta hologram, picture of
Passion killer, you're too much
You're the only one I wanna touch
I see your face every time I dream
On every page, every magazine
So wild so free so far from me
You're all I want, my fantasy

Oh, look what you've done to this rock 'n' roll clown
Oh Oh, look what you've done

Hologram - I don't want your
Hologram - I don't need your
Hologram - All I've got is a hologram
But it's not enough

There! Get outta my heaaaad!

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

Help me Anderson Cooper, you're my only hope.

[saint-buddha.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the little film about the making of Logan's Run? They were excited about using holograms too.

[cheezdanish.livejournal.com]

Agreed!

Re: Huh!

[ikkarus01.livejournal.com]

Well great, now it's stuck in my head. Thanks for that!

[spatch]

THERRRRREE ISSSSSS NOOOOOOOO SAAAAAAAANCTUUAAAAAAAAARYYYYYYY

(see, those were real holograms. CNN's thang was a form of video transmission with 3D information, but twarn't no holy-gram!)

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

I loved it when Anderson Cooper sang "Back To The Shadows Again" and made little vvvvvvipp noises as he got sucked back into the Funway.

[littlegirltoast.livejournal.com]

Fox NEWS switched to Seinfeld? Or just Fox?

[cursethedark.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'm sorry I missed the MSNBC thing. That sounds pretty cool.

I also noticed that CNN did their entire broadcast from the confines of their election center. This is unfortunate, as it deprived us of a repeat of the one good thing to come out of the 2004 election.

They had a shot of five experts or whatever, jabbering away. They're all sitting at a table in front of a bunch of windows, where a large crowd has gathered. They cut to one guy so that they can put focus on whatever he's talking about...and when they do, you can see a guy in the window behind him wearing a t-shirt that says "Fuck This Shit."

Beautiful.

[bostonista.livejournal.com]

Not sure, honestly.

[redtheblue.livejournal.com]

"Calls For Pre-Inaugural Impeachment: Premature or Justified?"

[spatch]

Of course, the Onion has their take: Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

(and that's important)

[spatch]

He got there quickly. Meanwhile, on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann still had to take the yellow rubber line.