US media prepares for ratings war

It’s election night, so it must be over to the megapixel giant touchmap. Fred Armisen has just zoomed in on Harrisburg in the swing state of Pennsylvania – then back out again.

Then in on Cleveland, Ohio – and straight back out again. “Now here’s New York, right there. New York was there in 2004 as well, and we can shake it around like that,” he says, wiggling a magic finger and making the graphic on the oversize flatscreen panel jiggle around too. “And check out Michigan – I can make it bounce.”

The megapixel touchmap is a parody, of course, courtesy of Saturday Night Live, another on-the-button skit from the veteran comedy show, which has come back into its own this election season. On the button because the US networks and the news channels are indeed vying to outdo each other with their technological wizardry as they finalise plans this weekend for the culmination of this most intensely-watched of presidential campaigns.

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On Tuesday night, the Big Three national networks will face their toughest ratings challenge ever from cable news – and all of them face the unpredictable threat of the internet, where a whole new generation of political obsessives will be pulling together their own DIY coverage. As befits a campaign that has been shaped by internet videos, cable TV punditry and reporting from the blogosphere in ways that are new to electoral politics, the media landscape will look significantly different tomorrow night than it did four years ago.

CNN’s John King was first with the touch-screen graphics, using his “magic wall” to sometimes laughable but mainly formidable effect during the primaries. Able to drill down into the cable channel’s formidable database of county-by-county exit polls and voting tallies, on 4 November it ought to eclipse anything the networks can manage, even if they have caught up with the technology itself. It is deep in the data from the swingiest counties of the swing states that the TV pundits will be able to find early clues on turnout and on demographic voting trends – and draw some early conclusions on whether young and black voters really did turn out to give Barack Obama a landslide, or whether white men swung back to John McCain and put the Republican back in contention.

The networks – NBC, ABC and CBS – have deep data of their own, too, and some razzmatazz on top. They are throwing more money than ever into their coverage this time out – in the expectation that viewership will eclipse the 53 million who tuned in to the different channels to discover George Bush had defeated John Kerry four years ago.

NBC, from its famous headquarters at “30 Rock” in New York’s Rockefeller Centre, is making full use of its location. It will be taking over the centre’s famous outdoor skating rink and turning it into a giant electoral map, which it will colour as the results come in. Meanwhile, up the side of the skyscraper – in the manner of a telethon – it will be projecting the latest electoral college tallies for the two candidates as the clamber towards the 270 that will award them the presidency.

Just a few blocks away, rival ABC will be engaged in the Battle for Times Square, as it broadcasts its output on a jumbotron, just across the way from Fox News, which will be doing the same, and less than a tourist bus-stop away from the giant MTV screen that will be showing Comedy Central’s own live election output.

The pyrotechnics aside, tomorrow is a deeply competitive night for the nations’ super-remunerated news anchors, too, all of whom are hosting six or seven hours of coverage. For Brian Williams of NBC and Charlie Gibson of ABC, who have been locked in a dead heat in the ratings war for their respectively nightly news shows, it is a chance for one to move decisively ahead. For Katie Couric on CBS, who trails a poor third, it might be a chance to avoid a long-rumoured and ignominious departure before the end of her $15m-a-year contract.

That Ms Couric has been a disappointment to CBS is no secret. The audience figures for her nightly news dropped to an all-time low in the summer and she regularly trails her two rivals by 2 million viewers or more. Having been lured from NBC’s morning magazine, the Today show, she has been dogged by criticism that her background as an interviewer makes her too fluffy to be an heir to Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, and that she has failed to establish a bond of trust with viewers.

Except that last month, in polite questions and gentle cadences, she handed Sarah Palin the rope to hang her vice-presidential candidacy in the eyes of wavering voters. That interview alone, playing forever on YouTube, might be enough to lift CBS from the bottom of the pile tomorrow, and positive election night notices might be enough to scotch executives’ thoughts of shunting her to other duties in the new year.

The duel between Messrs Williams and Gibson is evenly matched. The former is an NBC veteran of 15 years, as well-pressed and hairstyled to perfection as anyone in news, but with a hard-scrabble background from which he rose to the top of his profession without the aid of a college degree. (He dropped out to take a low-level job in the Jimmy Carter administration.) Mr Gibson, at 65, is 16 years the senior and on an unexpected and lucrative last lap at ABC, but some of the varnish has come off him this year amid criticism that he lobbed trivial questions at the Democratic primary debate and unfairly left Sarah Palin dangling with a question about a “Bush doctrine” he refused to define for her.

All the networks are promising more reporters in more locations around the country than in previous years – and also more reaction from abroad, reflecting that sense, tapped by Barack Obama, that what the world thinks of the US is somehow important. ABC, for one, is promising dispatches from Iraq and Pakistan, amongst other locales.

On cable, which continues to nibble away at the dominance of the national networks, CNN is loudly touting what it calls “the best political team on television”. Led by the always-shouting Wolf Blitzer and the urbane Anderson Cooper, the team is hoping to finally worst its old enemy Fox News, which held the cable ratings crown in 2004 with 8 million viewers to CNN’s 6 million. Rupert

Murdoch’s Fox has been growing viewers at a slower clip than its rivals this year, partly as the political tide has shifted against its brand of right-wing rabble-rousing, partly because its team of analysts, headed by Karl Rove, has looked low-rent compared to the large roundtables put together on CNN, and increasingly on MSNBC, which has emerged as a mirror-image version of Fox for the left.

In many ways, this might be MSNBC’s breakthrough night, the culmination of its growth in confidence and the growing fame of hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. During the conventions, MSNBC experimented with using these two liberal loud-mouths as anchors for straight news coverage, but it ended in tears. Not only was the channel condemned for blurring the line between news and comment, but it skirted ridicule as the two men fought bitterly on air. The egos will be pushed into a supporting role tomorrow night, acting as commentators under a neutral anchor, David Gregory, an NBC White House correspondent.

And finally, for the first time, the business channels are also getting in on the act, with CNBC and recently-launched Fox Business planning live shows and hoping to tap into the predominant concern of the campaign: the future of the US economy.

In this fragmenting media landscape, viewers will be able to head for the coverage that best fits their view of the world – and to build their own on the web at the same time. All the channels will be posting exclusive content online, whether it is CNN’s unfiltered iReporter initiative, which encourages users to upload their own video commentaries, the more formal efforts of ABC, which is putting regional correspondents extra air time via internet streaming, or Katie Couric’s 2am online-only video debriefing.

And of course they will be vying for attention with newspaper sites, such as The New York Times, which is unveiling new interactive graphics and will upload video from its own reporters, and with thousands of bloggers of varying hues and depth.

It will be an explosion of content that befits an explosion of interest in a historic presidential election. And it represents a bet that – landslide or squeaker – a big audience will be in for the night. After historically high ratings for the coverage of the primaries, the conventions and the debates, it looks a pretty safe bet.