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How Fox News and CNN reacted to Election Night 2024

Pabio November 6, 2024

A funny electoral campaign came to a strange end when Donald Trump claimed victory over Kamala Harris in the presidential race — and Fox News and NewsNation agreed.

“This will truly be the golden age of America,” Trump said in a speech to supporters early Wednesday morning. “This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again.”

Trump delivered his speech in a strange media space, in which he was not yet the winner declared by the Associated Press or other networks, but the outcome was clear.

But man, even though the data wasn’t there yet to qualify it, they all talked about it like it was a fait accompli for Trump. There were a lot of variations on “There are still votes to be counted” and so on, but this diminished after a while. Soon, analysts like CNN’s Van Jones were saying things like, “It’s not the elites who are going to pay the price.” These are the people who woke up this morning with a dream and go to bed with a nightmare. »

“It feels more like 2016 than 2020”

While pundits and pollsters said for weeks that the race was too close to call, that it might take days to declare a winner, the situation played out much differently. There was a strange familiarity about it all. As Chris Wallace said on CNN: “Right now, it feels more like 2016 than 2020.”

It was and it wasn’t. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was expected to defeat Trump easily. As that night unfolded with a sort of morbid curiosity, was this really happening? – media outlets have had to adjust their coverage on the fly, throwing out plans and inventing new ones from scratch.

Tuesday night was not like that. In a race supposedly too close to call, the surprise was not Trump’s victory, which was always a clear possibility, but how quickly the results took shape – it was supposed to take days, remember. That and the feeling of resignation among the networks. They talked about Harris’s chances the same way one talks about a person with a terminal illness who isn’t quite dead yet; you have to be careful not to talk about it in the past tense.

“A few weeks ago, there were some things that I didn’t think could happen,” said Daron Shaw of the Fox News Decision Desk. “I didn’t think Trump could win the national vote. I’m not saying he will, but it’s something that no one thought was possible. … It’s a possibility.”

It didn’t take long for Fox News to rejoice

It didn’t take long for the Fox News panel to start celebrating. Dana Perino complained that Harris had not conceded, even though no other major network had called the race — and although Trump still had not conceded the 2020 race. Later, Kellyanne Conway said she was worried about the backlash from Harris supporters, using words like “unhinged.” Again, no mention of the Trump-inspired January 6 insurrection.

We can expect four more years of this.

Things got off to a generally slow start

The day started out fairly routinely, with networks looking to fill the time until the polls closed. CNN spoke to a man who said he only voted because his girlfriend told him she would break up with him if he didn’t. Then he said he just made that up, that he thought it was funny to say. If he hadn’t voted, he would have spent the day eating chips.

The results couldn’t come soon enough.

In doing so, it didn’t take too long to realize that this wasn’t looking good for Harris, who announced late that night that she wouldn’t speak until Wednesday.

Brian Williams hosted streaming coverage on Prime Video

On Prime Video, where Brian Williams hosted the first streaming coverage of an election, Abby Huntsman said, before the call: “Just look at the seat, the atmosphere, the vibe that we feel when you go to our reporters over there. Kamala returned home. She went home for the night. You have bottles bursting at Trump headquarters. »

Indeed, there was, and eventually Trump appeared before the assembled crowd. It was far from 2020, when Trump prematurely declared victory in a race he lost, the results of which he still lies about. This speech was vindictive. This speech was more rambling and longer, in the style of his rallies during this election, but it mostly left the vitriol to people like Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who barked: “It’s is karma!” to the crowd.

“Here he is, giving a speech that is generally, as far as it is, unifying and generous,” Jake Tapper said on CNN, and we are already back on a curve.

Toward the end of his speech, Trump recalled the more than 900 rallies he has held.

“I’ll never do a rally again, can you believe it?” he said.

Be grateful for small favors.

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