CNN - Taking the Pulse of the Debate

One blogger poetically described it as the "Boner Meter," noting, "It flat lined for most of the debate, except when McCain got pissy, Obama agreed, or either one of them wiffed, even a little."

In reality the reactions were measured in a focus group in Ohio with an equal number representing each party. Dials operated by the viewers measured positive, negative, or neutral reactions and were graphed along a moving continuum according to responses.

It was the green independent line that stood out the most. It pulsed between bright electric green and white, searing across the muted red and blue. It was the most volatile and most concerning. As the green line goes, so goes the election.

So what exactly was the green line doing Friday night? According to a Media Curve poll conducted at the conclusion of the debate, Obama came out ahead among Independents in each of 9 categories, including overall winner. But whether or not you could have deduced that from watching the mesmerizing green line is, er ... debatable.

Those magical "undecided" and Independent voters were paid a lot of attention by all the major MSM outlets.  CBS held their own voter response group of 100 uncommitted voters who dialed in their responses as the debates went on. The network also conducted a scientific poll of 500 uncommitted voters after the debate was over. The poll results favored Obama for the most part, with 39 percent saying Obama had won the debate, 25 percent saying McCain had won, and 36 percent seeing it as a tie.



A Fox News focus group of undecided voters came back with a surprising tilt towards Obama.



Whether the CNN seismograph running along the lower third measured any real shake-ups was a little harder to tell. For the most part the device seemed an inscrutable distraction, sloping up and down along basically thematic partisan lines but dipping and peaking steeply at random and inexplicable times.
 
CNN seems to be determined to fill all available space with graphics and diversions, supplying useless factoid banners and unreadable gauges until the screen resembles the cockpit of the Starship Enterprise. On HD CNN, which I was spared in my cheapskate loyalty to tube TV, the horizontal margins were filled with "Analyst Scorecards" which measured plus and minus points for each candidate by a panel of six pundits. For those watching TV with an abacus at hand, I'm sure this feature was very effective.


CNN, as the first all-news-all-the-time cable channel has become a parody of itself. The 24-hour news cycle is now getting broken down into seconds. Do we really need viewer and pundit reaction to every word, every smirk, every breath, and every phoneme uttered by a political candidate? With units of meaning in news getting smaller and smaller, we may be missing the forest for the green lines.