Hey, this just in...it's Day 35 of the Election Thingy...can we drop the "Breaking News" logo and shit-can the animation? Please?

© 2000

This just in, again As the presidential election story plays out, cable news outlets have maintained an endless, sometimes lifeless, state of alert. Now, for an update.

By David Folkenflik Sun Television Writer Originally published Dec 9 2000

"It's Day Six," Jay Leno complained back on Nov. 13. "Can we drop the 'Breaking News' logo?"

Like a guardrail on a narrow highway, that strip has run across the bottom of television screens since the inconclusive Election Day of Nov. 7.

MSNBC is alternating "Breaking News" with "Decision 2000." The Fox News Channel screams, in big bright letters: "Election Alert." CNN's captions are only a little more sparing.

At one point, a Fox anchorwoman looked positively imprisoned, surrounded by captions to her left saying "Fox News" and "Live," by a box to her right tagged "Fox Facts" that gave additional details of a Florida court case and by a series of layered captions below that involved the elections and the nation's financial markets. The TV screen looked like a hyperactive Web site.

For the past month, the nation's cable news stations have happily jettisoned their normal programming in favor of a series of staged events - the parade of politicians encircled by flags, scripted protests by off-duty congressional aides and the lawyers setting out their dueling claims of stolen elections.

And it has all made for strangely compelling television.

As the scenario has progressed from the absurd to the ad-nauseum, the real drama has been found more and more in the courts. And the cable stations have aired relatively complete footage from Florida courthouses, even though they do not carry the smooth plot lines of "The Practice" or "Law & Order." Instead, they have willingly given their airtime over to the parsing of arcane election law.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the Democrats read aloud from exchanges in a deposition with Republican county election official Sandra Goard as if they were staging a dramatic reading.

Anticipation built up spectacularly yesterday as much of the conventional wisdom settled on the notion that Al Gore would shortly be losing three major - and the three final - opportunities in court, including one before the Florida Supreme Court.

State legislators also convened yesterday afternoon to start the process to select, on their own authority, Bush's electors as those of the state - a not-too-subtle televised message to judges that their judgments could be rendered irrelevant.

When the self-imposed 12:30 p.m. deadline lapsed yesterday for judges in two counties to release jointly their decision in the absentee ballot suits, CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno threw up his hands in exasperation and looked off camera for emotional support. MSNBC responded to the delay by resetting its countdown clock, which had been conspicuously ticking in the right-hand corner of its screen.

You'd think some of these folks might have learned from their repeated botching of results on Election Night: That kind of precision isn't to be had here.

Pundits who had dismissed Gore's chances were taken aback by yesterday's state Supreme Court ruling. "I'm still in a state of shock," said John Stubin, an MSNBC legal analyst who had all but called Gore washed up.

For much of the afternoon, MSNBC and Fox went to rival split screens, with their anchors narrating the day's events out of small boxes set in larger pictures of the courthouse sites where additional announcements were expected.

As the mess in Florida plays out, ratings have remained well above normal levels at all three major cable news stations. The coverage has become the nation's paisley-patterned wallpaper, ever ready to demand our attention. As CNN's Greta Van Susteren said this week, citing the words of Michael Corleone in "The Godfather, Part III":

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

The bookers, however, appear to have been inspired by Shakespeare's "Henry VI": The first thing we do, let's interview all the lawyers.

A flip through the offerings of television news found semi-celebrity defense attorney Gerry Spence over on CNBC, being interviewed by former talk show sludge-swapper Geraldo Rivera. Spence, known as much for the fringe on his leather jackets as his insights on constitutional law, was being asked his thoughts on the tensions between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

CNN repeatedly interviewed Barbara Olsen, a Republican lawyer who is the wife of Theodore Olsen, who just happens to be the Bush campaign's lead attorney, although that link was not always made on air. Roy Black, Lanny Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Joe diGenova, Laura Ingraham, Jonathan Turley - all these guys have reappeared on air. It was like a reunion from impeachment days, or the O.J. Simpson trial, or the aftermath of the Rodney King beating or the JonBenet Ramsey case.

Far more noteworthy than all that chatter was the ability to hear the exchanges between U.S. Supreme Court justices and the lawyers arguing before them. Never before had the court released an audiotape of its proceedings on the same day they occurred. And yet, it was not much different from hearing the Scopes "Monkey" Trial on radios throughout the country in 1925.

Surprisingly, the election proceedings have been largely absent from Court TV, the one cable channel perfectly equipped, one might think, to put so many legal wranglings in perspective. This week, Court TV has settled instead on the murder trial of former NFL player Rae Carruth, leaving coverage of the Florida presidential trials largely to its Web site.

"We're at a point right now where there's an abundance of trials going on simultaneously," said Court TV spokeswoman Frederika Brookfield, who said her channel's ratings are up by about 50 percent. "We're finding our viewers are very much looking to us for the Rae Carruth trial, because that's not being filled anywhere else."

Other quirky choices deserve notice, too.

· Alone among the networks, NBC refused to allow its stations (including affiliate WBAL) to carry an address to the nation by George Bush on a key Sunday night in November about Gore's decision to continue contesting the election. Instead, because it was part of the sweeps period, NBC sailed ahead with the blockbuster movie "Titanic" under the mistaken impression that there was anybody left in America who had failed to see the film.

· On Monday afternoon, WMAR and WBAL dropped their regular talk shows to carry Judge N. Sanders Sauls' monotone recitation of his pivotal ruling in a Florida circuit court against Al Gore. Yet WJZ stayed with Rosie O'Donnell's talk show all the way through, delaying until the start of the 5 p.m. newscast any mention of Sauls or action by the U.S. Supreme Court.

For Monday's 6 p.m. newscast, WJZ led with a story on a two-alarm fire in Randallstown in which no deaths or serious injuries were reported. Then came a piece by reporter Richard Sher about an apartment complex in Northwest Baltimore where some residents are without heat. Only then did the third story of the program cover the day's heady developments. That story lasted for 2 minutes and 10 seconds - only a bit longer than the subsequent 1-minute, 50-second piece on the constitutionally questionable hip replacement of former President Bush, which merited only a couple of sentences in most daily newspapers.

· This Wednesday, over on Fox, which has been exchanging fire with the Gore campaign over whether it provides fair coverage, afternoon anchor Shepard Smith several times misstated the participants in the lawsuit in Seminole County.

"The Gore camp is asking that all of these ballots be tossed," Smith said. Although the vice president clearly hoped to benefit from the suit, Gore did not join the plaintiff in filing it. Officially, the Gore camp was not asking anything of the judge.

Smith has his own legal affairs to tend to in Florida: He faces charges of aggravated battery with a motor vehicle. Prosecutors in Leon County say he drove his car into a freelance reporter who was standing in a parking space, according to published reports.

Those charges may take weeks or even months to sort out. With any luck, television will have found things in states other than Florida to cover by then.

-- Anonymous, December 12, 2000