Three days after staging their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are teaming for another ambitious event -- live election-night Comedy Central coverage (at 11 p.m. ET) of what it calls Indecision 2010. But this time, the real news networks are playing, too...
It was interesting to watch the broadcast news media cover the D.C. rally. That especially went for Fox News and Geraldo Rivera, who devoted a one-hour show to it the night after. But look at what's happening tonight, on the broadcast networks.
NBC and Fox start their prime-time election coverage at 9 p.m. ET, with Fox going an hour and NBC going two, devoting the biggest prime-time block of any of the major broadcasters.
For NBC, this, of course, serves two purposes. One is that NBC is so low-rated anyway, that clearing space for news isn't a sacrifice, but a possible improvement. And by giving Brian Williams and his team a place to be on an NBC News special, and continuing coverage after late local news, the network avoids the uncomfortableness of having to farm them out to sister cable network MSNBC -- which, even when reporting on election returns, tends to let its analysts crow or moan a little more than necessary.
ABC checks in at 9:30, after concluding results for the election that, to it, matters more: the week's elimination vote on Dancing with the Stars. (Which makes me think: If the networks would package these elections as reality shows, and gather candidates in a central studio to be voted off or given the office of honor, voter turnout, and interest, might be huge.)
CBS, which once ruled all election coverage with both length and depth, tonight devotes only at hour, from 10-11 p.m. ET, to midterm election results. So congratulations, CBS. The home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite has given its correspondents the same amount of time to cover tonight's elections as Comedy Central has given Jon Stewart and company.
Which reminds me -- My favorite commentary on the Rally to Restore Sanity, I'm both happy and proud to say, was presented here, in my son Mark's report on his visit to the Washington Mall Saturday to stand up and be counted. It's presented HERE, as the latest entry in his THE SON ALSO CRITICIZES column. (Please read and comment; he needs some quick TVWW reader love.)
Meanwhile, the father was there, too, separately. I told my son I'd call him when I got to Washington -- but by the time I arrived, the Mall was a black hole of cellphone non-communication, with neither calls or texts getting through. And even my plan of wearing an especially gaudy Hawaiian shirt (the one with the poisonous purple Brazilian tree frogs) as an added way for him to find me didn't work out.
It turns out in a rally that large, with costumes that plentiful, not even my shirts and I made much of a dent...