This was the night when the newly-seated big three anchors were to go head to head for the first time for election coverage, with Katie Couric anchoring her first election night at CBS, joining Charlie Gibson doing the honors at ABC and the relatively seasoned Brian Williams at NBC.
The midterms may have national significance, but all politics is local.
And so is political coverage, apparently.
So instead of any of those anchors all I saw was the local newsteams cutting back and forth to local campaign headquarters for speeches or explanations from correspondents who I largely didn’t recognize why there weren’t any speeches.
It was pretty awful stuff, to start with, with reporters all poised with advance stories on the races that anybody with any casual knowledge of the political season would have known. The vote totals when the local stations broke in -- WTHN at 9:30 p.m.; WVIT, WFSB and WTIC at 10 p.m. were still laughingly minuscule at 1 percent of precincts reporting. Nonetheless, they were able to call Rell the gubernatorial win minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m.; Lieberman was called shortly after 9.
When WFSB got into the results business at 10 (preempting the network news coverage just as every other affiliate did), Dennis House announced with some importance, the "WFSB Exit Poll Projected winner in tonight's hotly contested Senate race" -- only an hour after it was available elsewhere.
And when WTNH stumbled into a Nancy Johnson speech in which she appeared to talk about her 24 year career in the past tense, the anchors began to talk about it as "what appears to be a concession speech" meaning political upstart Chris Murphy staged a win, arguably the biggest story of the night for the state. (Is it possible one of their reporters could track this down?).
Once the speeches started coming, they came in a rush, causing news producers to try and pick which one to put on the air, and whose candidate party was really going to first produce an actual speech and not more introductions and stalling.
WVIT couldn't decided between the victory speeches of Rell and Leiberman. "We'll go back and forth," Gerry Brooks promised. Instead, they started with Rell, and then went with the bigger story, Lieberman's win, though his long-winded speech went on much longer. WFSB cut out from Joe's speech first (for an interview with gubernatorial loser John DeStefano). Then WVIT bailed (for some in studio analysis by Dan Malloy and Kevin Rennie), with only WTNH staying with Lieberman.
The sharpest analyst I heard was Toby Moffett on WTIC with Dean Pagani.
The Lamont concession speech was interesting and spirited, especially in the way it morphed into one of his stump speeches (dude, it's over!).
But the great missed opportunity was apparently the Chris Shays victory speech which nobody quite knew was a victory speech, since Diane Farrell didn't concede and the incumbent began with a reading of the war dead in his district. It was a tortured speech, the WTNH correspondent said.
Local stations cut in only when it meant pre-empting national news feeds. It was as if that was their mission: to blot the mother network's national coverage. Because local coverage covered only the national news -- in the 10 p.m. hours the networks had provided (or 9:30 -11 on ABC, along with the whole of Nightline's slot) not touching a minute of Letterman, Leno or Jimmy Kimmell. Not even their syndicated sacred cows of "Insider" and the 12:35 a.m. "Entertainment Tonight" rerun were pre-empted for even a second for any updates -- though there were local races to still be determined. These from stations that made millions from the campaign ads that led up to the election.
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