NEW YORK â Careful media coverage of a close presidential election Tuesday exploded so suddenly Tuesday that it left the bizarre spectacle of Fox News Channel analyst Karl Rove, a major fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, publicly questioning his networkâs declaration that President Barack Obama had been re-elected.
ABC News was also frantically trying to repair a power outage that left much of its set inoperable precisely at the time the election was being decided.
For several hours, election coverage resembled the run-up to a Super Bowl, with plenty of talk signifying little. Then NBC News, at 11:12 p.m. ET, was the first to declare Obama had won by virtue of winning the battleground state of Ohio. âHe remains president of the United States for a second term,â said anchor Brian Williams.
Other networks followed suit, including Fox five minutes later. But Rove, the former top political aide to President George W. Bush whose on-air presence on Fox this campaign raised some eyebrows because of his prominent role supporting Romney, suggested the call was premature.
âWeâve got to be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the candidates and a quarter of the vote left to count ⌠Iâd be very cautious about intruding in this process,â said Rove, a behind-the-scenes player in the wild 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore that took weeks to decide. (Gore was on TV Tuesday, too, as anchor of Current TVâs election coverage).
It left Roveâs colleagues struggling for words.
âThatâs awkward,â said co-anchor Megyn Kelly. She then went backstage to interview on camera two men who were part of Foxâs team in charge of making election calls. They had concluded that based on the precincts where votes were left to be counted, Romney couldnât beat Obama.
Later, Rove tried to make light of the encounter. âThis is not a cage match,â he said. âThis is a light intellectual discussion.â
As the evening had progressed for Fox and it became clear that Romney, the clear favorite of most of its audience, would find it hard to win, commentators like Sarah Palin and Peggy Noonan looked stricken.
âThis was the referendum that Mitt Romney wanted on Barack Obama,â said Huffington Postâs Howard Fineman on MSNBC. âAnd guess what? Barack Obama won the referendum. And thatâs pretty darned emphatic.â
Much of ABCâs New York election studio was left powerless for about 20 minutes at the height of Tuesdayâs coverage. The network didnât inform viewers, and tried to compensate by taking anchors Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos away from their desks, and cutting away to crowd shots at Times Square.
Sawyerâs relaxed, folksy delivery in her first presidential election night as anchor drew considerable social media attention. The rock group They Might Be Giants tweeted: âand Diane Sawyer declares tonightâs winner is ⌠chardonnay!â
Sawyer and Stephanopoulos were a new election anchor team for ABC, and Scott Pelley led the CBS coverage. Of the three anchors for the biggest broadcast networks, only NBCâs Williams was a returnee from 2008.
But it was a far different media world anyway. 2012 was notable for the vast array of outlets that an interested consumer could command to create their own media experience on multiple screens. Web sites offered deep drill-downs in data and social media hosted raucous conversations.
âIf you started a drinking game with the words âexit pollâ in it, please stop now. You will die!â tweeted TV critic Tim Goodman.
Obamaâs Twitter account tweeted a picture of the president hugging First Lady Michelle Obama, and within 45 minutes it was retweeted more than 300,000 times.
Earlier in the evening, journalists took special care not to rely too heavily on exit polls. Perhaps they remembered how misleading exit polls in 2004 led TV networks astray then or perhaps, in CBSâ Bob Schiefferâs words, its results this year were too contradictory.
News outlets carefully parsed information and sometimes used the same facts for contradictory conclusions.
Fox News analyst Brit Hume noted an exit poll finding that 42 percent of voters said Superstorm Sandy was an important factor in their vote, suggesting that was a positive for Obama since he was widely considered to have been effective in his response. With the same information, the web site Politico headlined: âExit Survey: Sandy Not a Factor.â
There was a certain amount of vamping time, too. Glenn Beckâs online network, The Blaze, had a blackboard straight out of the 1960s as a tote board. Beck killed time on the air by asking for cookie dough ice cream from the on-set food bar.
âWaffle cone, please,â Beck said.
When Sawyer asked David Muir for the latest news from the Romney campaign, he reported the family had pasta for dinner and the candidate indulged in his favorite peanut butter and honey sandwich.
The media personality with perhaps the most on the line was Nate Silver of The New York Times, whose FiveThirtyEight blog was sought out by 20 percent of the people who visited the newspaperâs website on Monday. He has used statistical data throughout the campaign to predict an Obama victory and by Tuesday, had forecast a 90.9 percent chance that Obama would win.
After Obamaâs victory became clear, Gavin Purcell, producer of âLate Night with Jimmy Fallon,â tweeted that âNate Silver is the only white male winning tonight.â CNNâs Piers Morgan tweeted Silver an invitation to appear on his show Wednesday.
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