Wednesday, May 7. 2008

Too much mapping/doodling in CNN election coverage?

Blogger Paul Wells (writing in a blog at Macleans) thinks CNN has overused its touch screen mapping driven by John King, the geospatial person of the year (Brian Timoney gets credit for that determination and he's quite correct).

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.

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