Let me preface this by saying the last time there was an August primary I was interested in, also involving Ned Lamont, I also was out of state, at New England Yearly Meeting in nearby Rhode Island.
These New England states are very close together, but it was impossible to get timely results of his win over Joe Lieberman that year. CNN would mention it in passing; the only other network covering it was Bloomberg. The local Providence stations didn’t mention it at all.
This year, it was a big improvement as far as that goes – streaming live coverage direct from CT-N, the state version of CSPAN, going largely unnoticed as it runs endless footage of legislative hearings year round.
The results Tuesday were about as glitzy as a public access channel, but at least we got the results.
Diane Smith was a big name anchor, but she seemed hobbled a bit by a broken arm she had suffered just hours before the broadcast. Necessitating a sling, she decided to cover it all with a big red coat, which seemed unusual, as if she was going to leave the desk in the second floor atrium of the state Legislative Office Building and go out into the snow at any minute.
To help her out was a broadcaster named Kenn Venit, who seemed a throwback to an earlier era of newscasting, now only seen in infomercials.
They brought in their guests, two by two, like Noah assembling the Ark, as if a Democrat on one side and a Republican on the other will somehow divine the truth among them.
They also had reporters from the relatively new online news outlet the Connecticut Mirror calling in from various gatherings of the candidates. CT-N couldn’t get its cameras at every location, let alone cut to them live, so they made do with a phone call and a picture of the caller, as if they were in Beiruit and not downtown Hartford.
Still, the Mirror reporters were good: Mark Pazniokas had a lot of detail about the candidates’ day that I hadn’t heard elsewhere (I am in Rhode Island keep in mind).
Best of all, CT-N kept the numbers coming along the bottom of the screen. Even with 5 or 7 or 10 percent of the vote reporting, many of the trends of the night, and the margins, held up for major races, such as that of Dannel Malloy over Lamont.
Things shifted about 9:45 p.m. when the concession speech came surprisingly early from Lamont and his running mate for lieutenant governor, Mary Glassman.
Though the sound had some problems at time, I appreciated hearing the whole thing, in full and first, on the online format.
Come about 9:57, though, the screen went black.
Earlier there had been some talk about CT-N entering into some historic agreement with both the Connecticut Mirror and CT-1 Media, the moniker for the Hartford Courant and Fox 61, to provide full coverage on a night when otherwise the broadcast networks would be showing their regular roster of reruns and reality shows.
How it turned out was: Mirror reporters calling in during the time taken by the CT-N Flashback Anchor Desk, then making way for the full Fox 61 newscast at 10 (and 11 as it turned out). That was it: No collaboration; simulcast.
And as such, those tuning in online also had to hear the very important news about the SkyBlue steward as well as the sports news in addition to the political results.
Things may be a little crazy for a live broadcast on election night, but this one was a doozy, with the anchors stalling a sentence or two before giving even one result; then parceling them out one at a time as they ping ponged to different campaign headquarters. At each, a talking head (or a phone caller) reported the “mood” of the place, as if that was the important news, but at none of them did we hear from an actual candidate, win or lose.
The Lamont concession was in the can, but viewers on the commercial broadcast (and its online stream) never heard it. It wasn’t until well after the first commercial break, that a winner or loser was actually heard from and in this case it was Linda McMahon, the former head (and occasional performer) for the WWE who won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Chris Dodd.
An old hand at TV drama, she then hijacked the live remote from the celebration by trotting out the candidate for a victory statement at the very same time. There was some stalling in the introductions to McMahon by a couple of supporters (one of whom called her the next senator from New York!). The decision was made not to cut from the scene, but to have the reporter yammer on over the comments of the introductions, though there was nothing actually to otherwise report but background, stalling until McMahon got out on the podium. Finally she did so, and she spoke slowly and deliberately about the win before the station finally pulled the plug.
McMahon may have been playing the news station for every free minute she could get, but the preponderance of coverage of her win could only provide ammunition to those who assume local Fox affiliates must be as biased toward Republicans as Fox News on cable.
The Malloy win was the night’s big news; he hadn’t been ahead in any poll before. But his coverage was much more succinct. The blessing of two consecutive hours of news is the luxury of presenting all speeches, in victory or concession, in full. But the only other live speech of the night came from another Republican candidate, Tom Foley, who secured the Republican nomination for governor.
Online, the Fox coverage was missing the important thing the CT-N coverage had: the constant march of numbers from nearly every race in the state. Not a single statehouse races got a mention on TV; viewers were left not knowing whether their local rep or state senator was in or out.
And among candidates for Republican challenger for Congress in district one; the anchor could not even pronounce Mark Zydanowicz, approaching it as if she had never confronted the name before.
I’m thinking she won’t follow the path of another TV anchor, who ended up winning the Republican nomination for the second district congressional seat: Janet Peckinpah, who just last year was pretending to be an anchorwoman again in a misleading TV ad for cutrate mortgages and now was telling supporters…well, we never did hear her speech.