Election coverage review

[A. Joseph Ross]

On 8 Nov 2006 at 19:00, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> It's a historical relic.  New Hampshire has one as well.  Certain
> things that in other states can be done by the Governor alone, or with
> the approval of the Senate, must be approved by the Council.

In Massachusetts the Council must approve judicial appointments and 
appointments to certain quasi-judicial boards.  It also passes on 
pardons, commutations, calling a special session of the Legislature, 
and certain contracts.  Most of this is pro forma.  

> Any impressions on the quality of the election coverage Tuesday night?
> I was mostly flipping back and forth between the Microsoft channel and
> NECN.  I should have listened to more of Gary LaPierre's presumptive
> last election-night broadcast, but I only heard about fifteen minutes
> of it.

I was at a Brookline Democratic Town Committee party, where they had 
NECN on.  I notice that NECN had no coverage of the overall race for 
Congress.  The crawl had various individual races, but nothing on 
overall Congressional seats.  And I didn't hear about a number of 
crucial races around the country until I left the party and started 
listening to WBUR on the car radio.  I didn't hear anything about 
overall control of Congress until I got home and started flipping 
between CNN and MSNBC.
 
> MSNBC had this incredibly annoying habit of dropping their House
> results crawl every time it was about to show the result of an
> interesting race.  Apparently, the box that generated it didn't have a
> "pause" control, so when it picked up again, the data for the
> interesting race had long passed.

I've noticed this on NECN and I think also on CNN as well.  This 
evening, I saw part of a story about the New Hampshire Legislature 
and started watching carefully for it to come around again.  It was 
just about to come around again when they took a break.  Then they 
returned with business news, and the crawl just showed stock market 
news.

Apparently the Democrats took control of both houses of the New 
Hampshire Legislature and also the Governor's Council.  New Hamshire! 
That's amazing.
 
> nytimes.com had commentary today (don't know if it appeared in the
> print edition) about Katie Couric's performance, which I did not see
> any of, and the general lack of women on the air in election
> broadcasts.  Local stations and regional services like NECN seem to do
> much better in that regard, presumably because their "star" anchor
> teams and reporting staffs are more gender-balanced.

There were women on NECN, CNN, and MSNBC.

> Then I went to bed and was somewhat irritated that WBUR was running
> NPR coverage instead of the BBC World Service; I would have liked to
> hear some other news and some international perspective.  (Not that I
> would have made a different decision had I been in Paul LaCamera's
> shoes.)

I noticed that too, but there were damn few radio stations covering 
any election news at all.

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 15 Court Square, Suite 210                 Fax 617.742.7581
Boston, MA 02108-2503           	         http://www.attorneyross.com