Inkless Wells

Inkless Wells

Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW

OK, this is now getting creepy

by Paul Wells on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 12:41am - 0 Comments

CNN is giving one-quarter of its screen to the actual primary-night coverage and three-quarters to John King randomly doodling on the touch-screen. For, like, the last half-hour. Anderson Cooper and some talking head are doing the talking-head thing, tucked over on the left side of the screen, and King is randomly doing his Tom-Cruise-in-Minority-Report shtick, scrunching the map down with his thumb and forefinger, shifting county maps back and forth, scribbling with the Glowing Green Finger. On most of the screen. A month after CNN put the touch-screen on the map (and vice versa), they have now fetishized it past irrelevance and into annoyance.

Now they’ve taken the actual people whose actual voices are doing the actual analysis offscreen altogether, so we can watch nothing but John King doodling distracetedly on his gigabyte Etch-A-Sketch. He doesn’t even seem to realize he’s on camera.

I’m flashing on that weekend in 1990 when Newsworld, new on air and fetishizing its shoestring, seat-of-the-pants vibe, ran 20 minutes of unedited Oka video, in an infinite loop, right through a weekend. Dozens of hours of the same unedited video. Instead of, you know, editing the video.

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  • http://www.todaysautonews.com jwl

    I was wondering about this as well. I assumed the person in charge of production was out for a cigarette break or something. That map is freakin’ cool but I don’t think it’s what people are tuning in for, to watch King doodle.

  • RP

    What was happening was that King was listening to the conversation about the results in various districts and he was silently trying to point out visually the areas the commentators were talking about. It may have appeared clumsy, but King was actually trying to point out exactly where the on the map the discussion was headed.

  • Rekha Joy Raman

    Why can’t the King pass the baton to Vanna White!

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  • Jackie Kent

    “…King is randomly doing his Tom-Cruise-in-Minority-Report shtick, scrunching the map down with his thumb and forefinger…”

    Great line. And while the touchscreen map is a better innovation than some other recently-introduced touches — floating 3-D graphs, I’m looking at you — I don’t see any point in having it on-screen except in short doses. Number-crunching without analysis is still just number-crunching, even if it’s happening in real time.

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