Thanks to cautious reporting, election day isn’t great TV

The irony of an election day, in TV news terms, is that for most of its course, it’s slow.

As crucial as the contest may be, it is, taken in real time, something like watching paint dry. (But in a very loud room.)

It focuses on a process that takes place in secret and whose results are not immediately known, which leaves most of the day for prognostication -- particularly circumspect this year, in light of recent election gaffes -- and punditry, which has also been fairly restrained, the early-favored Democrats not wanting to count unhatched chickens and the Republicans making discretion the better part of valor.

On the cable news networks, most other news was knocked into the crawl at the bottom of the screen -- Britney Spears is getting divorced, you might have seen that news a hundred times -- but for much of this election day, until the polls closed, there was little to discuss that hadn’t been hashed through in the weeks before. And in a year when hundreds of seats were up for grabs, the coverage focused inevitably on races that were close -- “too close to call” -- and whose resolution and meaning would be therefore reserved until a late hour or even another day.

For most of the news day, there was no news.

Having been bitten once by misleading exit polls, the networks, broadcast and cable alike, decided to rely on the counting of actual votes. (Their polling experts were also sent into a kind of group seclusion in New York, their cellphones and PDAs taken away in order to prevent “leaks” -- that is, to the blogosphere. CNN made up for the slight by inviting a couple of dozen citizen journalists to a blogging party.)

This ran counter to their historic compulsion to be the first to call winners, based on as little information as possible -- a smell in the wind, a snap in the air.

“We want to be doubly cautious,” said MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, and that caution was endemic: It was a day for “what if” and “who knows?” You could tell it was driving them crazy.

As the day wore on, the more august talking heads began to take their place, though for a long while they too were stymied by a lack of information.

Like Internet service providers or savings banks, the cable and broadcast news organizations deliver the same services; it’s perhaps too much to say their differences are merely cosmetic, since no two editorial policies are exactly alike. (And “merely” cosmetic is wrong, anyway, since cosmetics matter in TV.)

Fox News is perhaps more garish and obvious, continually waving its flag-bug, busting out “War on Terror” headlines, and gamely attempting to make the murder of actress Adrienne Shelly an immigration issue. As Democratic victories looked more likely, a pall seemed to settle over the network; Brit Hume seemed as though he could barely be bothered to continue.

Over at MSNBC, they seemed to be laughing a lot in a show of bipartisan insider hilarity, while the mood at CNN, with Wolf Blitzer and Jeff Greenfield contemplating their big “video wall” was pointedly serious and thoughtful. Each network offered commentators of varying degrees of dispassion, partisanship and windiness.

The same themes were taken up everywhere: the large turnout (see? candidates waiting in line!), the voting irregularities (see? candidates turned away from the polls!), the “nationalization” of the issues, and the weather, which let weatherpersons be political commentators.

The night was also seen as a kind of referendum on the network news anchors, none of whom had yet chaired the coverage of a national election.

It is clear, if nothing else, that they are three distinct personalities: Brian Williams, broad-shouldered, deep (“The analysts and the exit pollsters tell us this is an angry electorate out there and the voters have the power to unleash sweeping change”); Charles Gibson, boyish, buoyant (“Good evening. This is going to be a fascinating night. An election day is always a great day for a democracy”); Katie Couric, Katie Couric (“Hi, everyone. Well, it’s election night, and voters all over the country are deciding who will control the new Congress”). She was friendly and a little formal, informed but not insidery, and pointed up how male-dominated the competition is.

None were undone by the assignment.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com