Word: brokaw
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...Network TV news: An upset. See under "The Internet." Brokaw and the rest of his handcuffed colleagues would love nothing better than to see the Drudges of the world go online boldly and embarrassingly with exit-poll results that prove to be wrong. And if it's an exciting enough nail-biter of an upset to boost ratings, hey, that's gravy...
...course, having inside info is useless unless you can employ it to make yourself look really smart. So if you listen closely, you can hear intimations of what the polls say, or don't, in the coverage. "It does promise to be a long night," Tom Brokaw said starting out tonight; likewise, NBC News's Campbell Brown said "It's very intense [at the Bush campaign] today - there's a lot of tension, a lot of nervousness, a real sense of helplessness." (Without giving away the store, none of this means Gore's a winner; but it indicates that...
...Later this same hour, Michigan and Pennsylvania fell to Gore, and Tom Brokaw too was subtly taunting Senator Fred Thompson about the Austin party. This party, however, isn't quite over yet. Anybody wants to bring some Cheez-Its by the Time-Life Building in Manhattan, you'd be more than welcome...
...None of this means anything (just as, it turns out, the networks' first call of Florida, it turns out, didn't mean anything either). And as a sheepish Tom Brokaw is himself saying now, "Just because we project a state... doesn't make it so." OK. But projecting a state should mean a pretty solid confidence that you're not going to need to un-project it. If you don't have that confidence, then why project it? Simple. To win a pointless, irrelevant journalistic competition...
...Most Bizarre Tip of the Hat: Tom Brokaw, at about 2 a.m., doing a dead-solid imitation of David Brinkley saying, "I thought I'd be out somewhere having a lemon squash and a glass of milk at this hour...