Seven Networks, Parade Of Pundits = Huge Headache

More was ultimately less Tuesday night as TV news fought to make sense of the largest presidential primary day in American history.

By 10 p.m., at least seven channels had plunged into the story: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News.

By 10:15, it was enough to make your head explode.

The problem was not a lack of good-faith effort by any network. They threw their resources and A-teams into the battle - Katie Couric at CBS, Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson at ABC, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, and so on.

CNN’s graphics board had size and gadgetry enough to launch the network into orbit, and everyone had big-picture analysts and microscopic-numbers geeks swarming in front of every camera.

They all worked hard to cater to the new information consumers of the Internet age. ABC hired a correspondent from Facebook. Fox News checked in with bloggers.

The result was some sharp analysis and incisive commentary - Bob Schieffer of CBS stood out, as usual - and most of it got buried under the sheer mass of the rest.

Even viewers who wisely tuned in late and stuck to one channel often must have felt like they had asked for a drink of water and someone turned a fire hose on them.

More specifically:

# The maps that showed who was winning which state were for the most part unreadable. The CNN and Fox News maps, notably but not alone, had so many colors they were utterly useless as quick reference guides.

# The clutter of on-screen graphics, particularly on the cable networks, made business channel screens seem clean.

# The broadcast networks are criticized for their old-school approach, with fewer numbers and more broad summations, but that made them far easier to follow. That said, when NBC joined the party at 10 p.m., Brian Williams gave no summation of where things stood overall, instead just running through individual states.

# With so much airtime to fill, there were inevitable indulgences - Joe Scarborough claiming credit for Mike Huckabee, Brit Hume almost giggling as he called New York for Hillary Clinton the second the polls closed, CNN becoming obsessed with the county voting in Georgia.

The problem was not the occasional tangent, though. The problem was that the collective avalanche of information too rarely accomplished the function of news, which is to clarify what’s happening.

That’s not all the networks’ fault. As Peggy Noonan noted on NBC, it’s a confusing story partly because it’s still a confusing election.

Last night’s TV coverage of Super Tuesday was a little like anchovy pizza: There’s a core audience that can never get enough - but if you don’t also offer the basics, a lot of your customers leave hungry.

– By David Hinckley

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