PressEthic

Last night, millions of viewers tuned into CNN's "America Votes" coverage of the midterm election. It included all the same major elements as the 2004 general election coverage: pundit panel, the massive screen in the Situation Room, and correspondents in place at the site of each major or close race. This time around, however, there was an addition.

In an attempt to embrace the new media that challenges traditional twenty-four hour cable news channels, CNN launched a big internet-meets-television event they cleverly called an E-Lection Night Blog Party. The television portion was rather insubstantial. Wolf Blitzer would check in with the correspondent at the party, which was held in a restaurant in Washington, DC, who would announce that people were blogging. The camera would pan around the room and show people sitting at computers, like at a computer lab, only they had cocktails. And the whole event amounted to a great plug for the restaurant where it took place, which, we were told repeatedly, is called Tryst, and is on 18th Street. That information is reiterated on the website (which is, of course, in blog format), in case we missed it.

While CNN did manage to gather some people from fairly interesting and somewhat significant blogs like Wonkette, Huffinton Post and InstaPundit (a complete list is on the website), they never managed to solidly establish the point of the Blog Party, which came off as a lame stunt.

The website (perhaps due to the blog format) also lacks the structure or organization to convey its own point. It includes a type of post that quotes viewer's email responses to questions asked on air and another where it links to bloggers' responses to exit polls. Perhaps the best post of the night is the one in which bloggers identify what the "great thing [is] about being in a roomful of bloggers."

Naturally, networks like CNN are trying to keep current with the changing times, and the role of blogs in politics has been paramount in recent years. Of course, they can't beat 'em, so joining 'em is the only way to go. This is not CNN's first venture into the blogosphere, but they still haven't determined how best to integrate the technologies. It's a tricky question, but surely this kind of clunky, poorly thought out programming is not the answer.