• by November 4, 2004

WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT AMERICA WHEN MORE PEOPLE WATCH THE SUPER BOWL THAN ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE? - It's amazing, but true. According to Nielsen estimates, 55 million people watched the primetime coverage on the six major national TV networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC - that covered the election.

Add a couple more million to that, those who tuned into Fox Broadcasting's limited coverage, and Spanish-language networks Univision, Telemundo and Telefutura, and the combined coverage of the first Tuesday in November failed to approach the 90 million people who watched a single football game carried by one television network on the first Sunday in February.

Then again, this could be a good thing. Unlike professional football, the 2004 presidential election proved not to be a spectator sport. A far higher share (60 percent) of American voters actually went to the voting booths than tuned into their boob tubes.

That means we are more a nation of voting-lever participants than armchair quarterbacks. Or, maybe it just means that Election Night coverage simply isn't good television. That for all its unplanned, unpredictable spontaneity, presidential election coverage has grown surprisingly predictable. Predictable in the sense that the outcome wasn't about to be predicted Tuesday night, at least not in primetime, or not even in the extended primetime of a World Series game.

Especially this year, with the networks operating - appropriately - cautious, most American viewers knew the final score of the game wouldn't be revealed until the wee hours, if not the following morning, or possibly in the days to come. And as Nielsen's ratings show, that's an anathema for a live sporting event, whether it's taking place on a football gridiron, a baseball diamond or a political battlefield.

Unlike the Super Bowl, or the World Series, or even the Oscar telecast, where we all know anything can happen at virtually any time, American viewers simply understood nothing extraordinary was likely to appear on their TV screens during election night. In fact, the only remotely spontaneous thing to occur was when George W. Bush broke precedent and unexpectedly summoned members of the White House press corps to join him for an impromptu sound bite around the First Family's TV room.

Heck, it wasn't even a sound bite. It was more of an audio-less video bite of a smug Bush basking in the glow of his apparent win, surrounded by family, friends, and members of the press, exuding the kind of presidential confidence he failed to exhibit in the final weeks of the campaign - certainly not during the real game: the presidential debates. And if we weren't mistaken, we would swear we spotted the spigot of a keg peeking up behind the couch.

That may have been chatter for the pundits, but it certainly wasn't the kind of compelling, stay-up-late-at-night television drama that would make Nielsen's meters go pitter-patter. We all knew there weren't going to be any TiVo moments.

Dick Cheney wasn't about to bob, weave, feint, and rip at an article of presidential attire to brazenly reveal a bare W breast. Certainly, not in front of the First Lady, or the twins - daughters, we mean. The truth is that Election Nights are not the Big Game, and they make far better pre-game and post-game shows than live televised events.

WHAT IT TAKES TO STOP TIME? - What does a leading representative of print media news do when it wants to make news about an important news event? It turns to outdoor media, of course. At least, that was the big story touted by Time magazine, which couldn't actually call the presidential election within its own, clunky print milieu so it opted to ride the boards, as they say.

The boards - there were two of them - one on the West Side Highway in Manhattan and another on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles - featured a ticking clock whose pendulum extended a frame that had been swinging back and forth between Time cover photos of Bush and Kerry. And sure enough, like hickory dickory dock, when the clock struck one (EST), out they run, to say who won, freezing the image on Bush.

The effort was part of a larger two-year, $5 million "guerrilla" media campaign crafted for the Time Inc. title by Fallon. It's supposed to show the "a-ha factor," said the magazine's press release, showing how "Time magazine surprises readers with insights that have not appeared elsewhere."

What surprises us is that a nationally distributed magazine has to use billboards to do that. Not that there's anything wrong with outdoor media, mind you.