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The news cycle is now so quick that, for CBS and ABC, Tuesday night's news was already history by the time Wednesday's newscasts aired. Only NBC led with Barack Obama's oratory as he accepted victory over John McCain in the 2008 Presidential election. ABC and CBS both started off by looking forward to the next administration: the President-elect assembled his tradition team under the leadership of John Podesta, a former Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's White House. Despite their leads, the General Election was Story of the Day, with Obama achieving a provisional 349-173 lead in the Electoral College, with 16 votes still to be allocated. With CBS and NBC continuing to use their Election HQ for their newscasts, all three networks expanded their format to a full hour to mark the occasion. Tyndall Report, for the sake of consistency in our database, monitors just the first half hour of each newscast here.

It was a day for old media. "Headlines are selling like hotcakes from coast to coast," declared NBC's Kevin Tibbles, pointing to thousands of Obama supporters snatching up newspaper front pages that declared his victory. "The first edition of the Chicago paper sold out immediately so they simply waited for more." ABC's David Muir (no link) called it "an extraordinary image" as souvenir hunters from Atlanta to Washington stood in line to buy their local paper. The New York Times printed an extra edition of 75,000 to satisfy the demand. NBC's Lee Cowan told us about the celebrations "from coast to coast" the moment the networks announced Obama's win, "but it was Grant Park, in Obama's home town of Chicago, where the cheers were the loudest--a quarter of a million people, many moved to tears."

Not only newspapers but posters too were mementoes of Obama's big night. CBS' Bill Whitaker introduced us to Shepard Fairey, a Los Angeles street artist, who designed that HOPE poster of Obama's face with blue shadows on one side and red shadows on the other. His original print run was 350 before "it went viral on the Internet." It is now 400,000 and counting.


Andrew Tyndall 11/12/08 10:51:29 pm

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