TVSquad

So now the election is over and we have a new President-elect. Congrats to Barack Obama.

We covered the coverage of the election last night on various stations, including ABC, CNN, FOX News, NBC, MSNBC, and Comedy Central. I covered CBS to see how Katie Couric did on her first night as election anchor. I'm a fan of Katie's, and for the most part I haven't agreed with the criticisms against her (beyond the growing pains she and the show had when she started), and I think she did a fine job.

So let's go over the good and the bad.

The Good: It was somewhat calming to have just Katie and four or five analysts giving the information throughout the night, compared to a network such as CNN that seemed to have several dozen pundits and reporters spread out around many tables. There's such a thing as having too much information from too many places. It's overload. Even beyond Katie's fancy dancy control board and the various screens and charts and graphics, CBS's coverage was actually kinda old school, and I appreciate that in this day of holograms. Lots of technology, but we weren't hammered with it.

Because of this calm, controlled set up, when Katie actually had breaking results news or had to go to a graphic or had a new person to interview, it wasn't jarring or overdone with massive music or graphics. God I loved that.

The bad: The biggest loser of the night? It wasn't McCain, it was the Energizer battery company and Verizon. Couric made two references to commercials, one being the "EverReady bunny" and "Can you hear me now? I sound like a Sprint commercial." Katie, you have four years to study up on your commercial icon references.

I also think that the HD experiment at CBS was a failure. Not the picture, I mean the various charts they shoved on the sides that showed everything from delegate counts for every state to what seats were picked up or lost by the Dems and the GOP. The HD charts worked on NBC, but on CBS it was too hard to read and glitchy. That's something they can easily fix though.

Overall though, a great job. There was so much talk about Katie leaving CBS after the election. I don't know if that's true or not (recent good press, such as the Sarah Palin interview with Couric, seems to have stopped that talk for now, and she wants to do an hour-long newscast), but I think she should stick around. Unless CBS wants to ditch their evening newscast altogether, I think Katie is the person who should hold the anchor spot.

She just needs to know her bunnies and phones.