The Cable Election Upset of the Age

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Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers.

Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner-workings of the media industry. Tonight, we go back inside CNN, where morale has taken yet another hit after an historic election-night ratings loss, and Chris Licht is girding himself for a town hall with restive staff.

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The Cable Election Upset of the Age

Sans Wolf Blitzer and his “key race alerts,” CNN lost the overall ratings battle to MSNBC on election night. It’s a sign that an era keeps ending, of course, but also that the executives in charge haven’t yet figured out how to create the next one.

DYLAN BYERS

For an entire generation, there have been two truisms of election night coverage in the United States. First, every other November, Wolf Blitzer has been a fixture in living rooms across the country, calmly and monotonously imploring us to “stand by” for another “key race alert,” which as often as not just indicated that polls were about to close in a few more states, allowing the vote count to actually begin. This soothing balm of nonchalant fastidiousness seemed to carry America through the night, simultaneously keeping us on edge for the next supposedly “breaking” development while somehow lulling us into a familiar patois. Some people loved Wolf, some people mocked Wolf, but a great many people relied on Wolf, and, indeed, on CNN.

And that was the second truism of election night coverage: the night seemed to belong to CNN. During historic general elections...

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