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    • News channels have a relatively traditional election night experience
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    News channels have a relatively traditional election night experience

    Vaseline Posted on

    Despite all the concerns about a tumultuous process that could leave Americans waiting for days to learn who the next president would be, the news media instead enjoyed an election night that adheres closely to tradition.

    Fox News Channel was the first at 1:47 a.m. Wednesday to declare that Donald Trump had regained the presidency. Other television networks and The Associated Press had Trump on the verge of returning to the presidency when he took the stage in Florida at 2:25 a.m. to declare victory. “This is, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said on stage at his victory party in West Palm Beach.

    His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, would speak later Wednesday morning, her campaign manager said, dispersing a crowd that had gathered at Howard University to celebrate her.

    Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news sites and one streaming service – Amazon – covered the count steadily until Wednesday morning. Many of their journalists had done so too warned viewers that determining the winner can be a lengthy process that may take several days, as it was in 2020.

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    Members of the media work ahead of an election night campaign observation party for Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

    But from the first hints provided by the exit poll results shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern Time, the election night narrative moved methodically toward Trump. The dam broke at 11:18 p.m. Tuesday, when the AP called the first of seven battleground states, North Carolina, for the former president.

    Networks develop quickly

    The networks quickly moved to the post-mortem stage.

    “This looks a lot more like 2016 to me than 2020,” said NBC’s Chuck Todd, a reference to Trump’s victory that year over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

    Fox News Channel pointed to exit poll results showing Trump making gains among young voters and Latinos. “The Biden-Harris people pushed them into Trump’s open arms,” said Fox’s Dana Perino, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush.

    “Maybe,” said Fox News’ Brit Hume, “it’s time for his enemies to end it.”

    In his speech, Trump praised his running mate, JD Vance, for “entering the enemy camp” for interviews on places like CNN and MSNBC. “He absolutely destroyed them,” he said.

    Hours earlier, as the first exit poll results showed the unpopularity of President Joe Biden and Americans with a dim view of where the country was going, CNN’s Chris Wallace said that “it would be a miracle if Harris could win with that.” His colleagues, Dana Bash and Audie Cornish, warned him against jumping to the conclusion that Harris would be to blame, but Wallace sounded more prescient as the night progressed.

    “As a sitting vice president, she tried to do something that had never been done before: succeed an unpopular president,” Todd said.

    Analysts doubt the race element

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    Voters wait in line to cast their ballots at Scranton High School in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

    Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, an NBC News analyst, said the element of race could not be left out. Some Americans felt more comfortable with President Joe Biden, a white man, than with Harris, who was trying to be the first woman of color elected president, she said.

    “Can you imagine a woman of color behaving the way Donald Trump behaved – even for one day?” CNN analyst Van Jones said. “The kind of things he said, the kind of things he did, the way he insulted people. If you’re a person of color, you don’t feel like you have the freedom.”

    Trump had “a license to just be a fool, just be an obnoxious asshole… and he gets to be president,” Jones said.

    Due to the remarkably close polling before the election, the outcome was considered a mystery that could take many days to solve. In his final prediction before the election, statistician Nate Silver said it was no better than a coin flip, giving Harris a very slight advantage.

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    The New York Times predictive Needle rated the match early in the evening as a “toss-up,” leaning somewhat toward Trump. But it moved steadily toward Trump, to the point where, by midnight, the Times assessed that Trump had a 90 percent chance of becoming president again.

    Also by midnight, by CNN’s count, Harris was leading in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the so-called blue wall that was central to her strategy for victory.

    “It’s not an impossible mission” for Harris to come back and win Pennsylvania, CNN’s John King said, looking at voter statistics. “But it will be an unlikely mission.” Within two hours, CNN awarded Pennsylvania to Trump.

    For much of the night, the journalists standing in front of “magic boards” — King, Bill Hemmer on Fox News Channel, Steve Kornacki on MSNBC — took up much of the airtime with detailed reports on the results. By state, by county, they showed figures in which Trump outperformed his 2020 campaign and Harris lagged behind Biden’s results.

    The networks were more likely to rely too heavily on their Czar numbers rather than their reporters.

    It was a relief to get results

    The presence of actual results was a tonic for news organizations that had weeks – and an excruciatingly long time voting day – to talk about an election campaign that polls repeatedly show to be remarkably tight. They tried to gain wisdom from anecdotal evidence.

    “Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” said CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin, straining to draw meaning from the small breed. Community of New Hampshire which reported its 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early morning hours.

    Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams, during his one night leading Amazon’s streamcast gig, had an unexpected guest at the California studio where he was operating. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was scheduled to report from Trump headquarters in West Palm Beach, but the former president’s team was denied credentials to attend.

    Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social media site

    Neither Axios nor Politico would immediately confirm reports that some of their reporters had been similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately return requests for comment.

    ___

    David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him up http://x.com/dbauder.

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