TVSquad

Thankfully, NBC has decided once again to do different election coverage than their kissing cousins at MSNBC. So instead of David Gregory trying to moderate slap fights between Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough, and Chris Matthews, we get the relatively dignified analysis of Brian Williams, Chuck Todd, Tom Brokaw, Andrea Mitchell and Ann Curry. Whew. Looks like I selected the right network.

Some observations from the first couple of hours of coverage:

• Chuck Todd really has to shave his goatee. Yes, it was nice for awhile. But he might be the host of Meet the Press after this election is over; how can any one take him seriously with that "look, Ma, I can grow a beard!" look?
• Ann Curry is doing exit polling in a green room. Not a green screen, mind you, but an entire green room. It's freaky. Williams wanted to assure us that Curry was safe from those flying graphics. Nice of him.
• Does Williams have to remind us of his blue-collar, fire-fightin', hard-drinkin' past at every turn? "It's probably not a good thing that I know where Finnegans' Wake (a bar in Philly that's Obama's HQ there) is" he says to Mike Taibbi. Thanks for the insight into your past, Bri.

I'm sure a lot of you were scratching your heads over the weekend, wondering how Tim Russert's passing merited the all-encompassing, presidential-like coverage it got, especially on his home network of NBC. He's only a reporter, right? Why the wall-to-wall coverage? Well, first of all, it seems that by all accounts, Russert was one of the most well-liked people in the news business, so the outpouring might have been a function of people mourning a friend who was taken from them too soon. But, I have another, more off-beat theory as to why NBC did a broadcast version of sitting shiva for Russert: it was because they have no idea how to replace him.

Think about it: he wasn't only the longtime moderator of Meet The Press, where he took the venerable show and rejiggered its format, making him the face of the show. He was also NBC News' Washington bureau chief and the main political voice for the network. "It's going to take four or five people to replace Tim," CBS' Bob Schieffer told The New York Times.

For now, though, the immediate question is who will replace him on Meet The Press. Speculation is already underway.

This must be the day for lists. First the Harris Poll says that Ellen DeGeneres is more popular than Oprah Winfrey, and now the Tyndell Report has announced their list of the 20 most heavily used reporters in 2007.

I'm not sure who I would have thought was number one, though I guess the names Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory come to mind, since they seem to be every newscast. But number one is actually ABC's Jake Tapper, who handles a lot of political reporting for the network. Gregory and Mitchell are on the list, at numbers two and three, while CBS' David Martin is fourth and Nancy Cordes fifth. Cordes is listed as being on both CBS/ABC, so I'm assuming she left CBS and went to ABC? I'm surprised to see Steve Hartman on the list, since I thought he only did the Friday night "Assignment America" series. Maybe he does other reporting.

The full list is after the jump.

I knew that Chris Matthews hadn't been on Hardball for a couple of weeks, but I didn't know the reason: he was hospitalized due to complications from diabetes.

Matthews will be back on the MSNBC show tonight at 7pm, where he will interview former Vice President candidate and probable future Presidential candidate John Edwards at one of those "College Tour" stops, this one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Various hosts have been filling in for Matthews while he was in the hospital. Andrea Mitchell went in his spot during a panel discussion at the Castle at the Smithsonian at the end of November, and then Campbell Brown filled in on the college tour. For the past several days, columnist Mike Barnicle has filled in for Matthews on Hardball.