Recent commentary from National Journal: Political Pulse: The Cost of Victory, by William Schneider (November 22, 2000) Each candidate has to make a political calculation: how much is winning this election worth? Legal Affairs: It's About More Than Which Judge Has the Last Word, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (November 22, 2000) Neither literalism nor originalism nor postmodernism can substitute for the old-fashioned quality called wisdom. The Campaign: Losing the Election Shouldn't Make You a Loser, by Carl M. Cannon (November 22, 2000) The ethos that holds that the winner takes everything and the loser is a fool is a barrier to statesmanship. Media: Amending the Media Constitution, by William Powers (November 15, 2000) The American media universe is supposed to be unjust, but in some ways it has the most ruthless justice of all. Legal Affairs: How Lawyers And Pols Can Get Us Out of This Mess, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (November 15, 2000) Our current predicament illustrates how our legal culture has degraded our political and moral cultures. Political Pulse: It Was All About Sex, by William Schneider (November 15, 2000) Men voted for George W. Bush by a wide margin; Al Gore was the women's choice. The Campaign: Fight or Concede? What Would Martin Sheen Do?, by Carl M. Cannon (November 15, 2000) The fighting spirit of Team Gore has taken on a life of its own. But at what cost? More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.

Media: The Great White Board Before memories of Election Night (and the nets' by and large miserable performance) fade to black, a last look at Tim Russert's low-tech white board and why it was such a hit by William Powers November 22, 2000 For a few days after Election Day, the detail everyone simply had to mention was Tim Russert's white board, the low-tech wipe-away surface on which NBC's irrepressible political boss scrawled the electoral tallies as they came in. Everyone not only mentioned it, but mentioned it in almost exactly the same way. The white board was fun or neat or cool or amusing or delightful. "It was charming," wrote Washington Post television columnist Lisa de Moraes, echoing the morning-after chatter of thousands. And so it was. On a night when the media did nothing else remotely charming, the white board was a little something to cling to, a harmless tension breaker, the whispered joke at the funeral. Maybe that's all it was. But in an atomized media universe in which it's usually hard to find anyone who saw the same news you saw, there was something more than just remarkable about the white board's pull. It was as if every jaded surfer froze on NBC, mesmerized by Russert's dumb prop, then stayed around to watch what he did with it. The ratings seemed to confirm this; the network's election coverage flattened the competition, pulling in more than 18 million viewers, or about 19 percent better than runner-up ABC. You can attribute this to other factors -- Katie Couric's eternal huggability maybe, or Tom Brokaw's wild popularity in the Greatest Gen/Barcalounger demographic. But none of this, and nothing else about NBC's coverage, was new in the way that old white board was new. And the next day, when the screwy election itself should have obliterated all details from the coverage except the premature projections, the white board persisted. Not for the reason that most media minutiae persist -- because they annoy or outrage us -- but because we liked it so much. When it comes to political news, this kind of affection is almost unheard of. So, before the white board drops down the memory hole, it seems worth taking one last look at it, to see whether we can figure out why it was such a hit. There's an obvious reason, and many professional watchers noted it right away. "More than 19 million viewers rejected the ultraslick sets and high-tech bells and whistles on the other networks in favor of the simple homespun comfort of Tim Russert and his dry-erase board," wrote de Moraes. This is true, but it omits a crucial fact, which is that NBC is the slickest of the slick, home to more moving graphics and other prepackaged gimmicks than anyplace else in all of mediadom. It's NBC that introduces its news shows with baroque three-dimensional graphics straight out of some hokey George Lucas ride at Disneyland. It's NBC that makes sure some portion of the screen is always in motion, on the theory -- no doubt "proven" by countless focus groups -- that unless something is gyrating, we, the boneheaded public, will get bored and click away. This is why, behind and beneath and between the heads of Brokaw and Couric and Matthews and the other NBCers, you see all those spinning stars, those dilating peacock feathers, and that weird, slowly rotating thing that looks like a thick blue slinky. It's NBC that slaps a brand name on every big story, because (the network seems to think) without a label that reminds us of, say, Tommy Hilfiger, we won't care about such dull stuff as politics. Thus, the Florida vote-count story not only features the onscreen peacock, the "LIVE" shield (with its very own moving background), and the headline of the hour, but also the brand name BATTLE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE, which is just a sub-brand name of DECISION 2000. And it all appears on screen together, one big spinning, swirling, blinking pinball-machine party of high-tech wildness. And it's all doomed. NBC has had a good run with this stuff because it was new and America loves novelty. But people are not as boneheaded as NBC thinks. Unless the culture is truly sliding into the abyss (and I think it's not), the future of news is not in manipulative tech-heavy tricks, but in simple, direct delivery of information about the world. Because the public knows it's being manipulated, and it is inevitably growing tired of it. As time goes by, mass taste will move gradually away from news outlets that feel more manipulative, toward those that feel less so. The most far-seeing media people have been onto this for a while. C-SPAN is onto it, and the network has grown in importance precisely because it is relatively free of NBCesqe packaging, graphics, movie star anchors, and other gimmicks. Matt Drudge is onto it, and the stark pretech aesthetic of his Web site is one reason it draws so many hits every day. Ours may be an entertainment-obsessed culture, but at bottom we still know there's a difference between the entertainment that is news and the entertainment that is Disneyland. They're not the same thing, and when you go to C-SPAN or Drudge or to watch Tim Russert using a white board, there's an implicit acknowledgment that you understand this. I don't have to trick you into paying attention to the news, they say, because the news is interesting all by itself. A nicely turned headline in a simple font; a cleanly asked question from an anchor who doesn't look like she's had her face reconstructed for the job; a few dramatic election numbers scribbled in red marker on a stupid white board. They'll do just as well as any eye-diddling machine-generated tricks. No, they'll do better. What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.