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And as anyone who watches cable news knows, the shouting is never over.
If you happened to be waiting for results from CNN last night, you might have seen panelists, with no raw votes yet to chew on, screaming to make themselves heard on the all-important question of whether Barack Obama's preacher was better or worse than John Hagee, the anti-Catholic minister who's endorsed the presumptive Republican nominee.
Scenes like this are why your remote has a mute button.
Still, it was a tricky day for the talking heads, with hours to fill before the polls closed in Pennsylvania, a strong sense that Hillary Clinton had prevailed and a need to maintain some sort of suspense, anyway.
On Fox News Channel, the first of the three 24-hour news networks to call Pennsylvania for Clinton, the suspense lasted a full 45 minutes. At 8:45 p.m., with fewer than 1 percent of the votes in, Fox blew the whistle.
MSNBC followed a couple of minutes later, while CNN waited till shortly after 9, when, with 6 percent of the vote in, it suggested that on its all-blue map, Clinton's light blue would eventually overwhelm Obama's darker blue.
Given past disasters involving exit polls, the C in CNN might last night have stood for Cautious, but with ratings hanging in the balance, it might also have meant Canny.
Who, after all, wants to be first if first means viewers change the channel?
On Fox News, where Karl Rove by 9:30 was assessing what the ongoing Democratic Party split would mean to John McCain, that might have seemed less of a problem.
"Fair and balanced Fox, you beat them all!" Clinton adviser Terry McAuliffe told Fox News' Major Garrett during an interview, to anchor Brit Hume's delight.
But if we assume that Fox News knows its core audience really is more interested in what all this means for McCain than in the exact margin of Clinton's victory, then it was up to CNN and MSNBC to try to wring as much drama out of what one MSNBC analyst described as "the point spread."
If there was anything remarkable in the generally unremarkable television coverage of the Pennsylvania primary that only a few months ago was expected to be anticlimactic, it was in the way that Clinton had once again managed to change what's come to be called "the narrative," giving the talking heads who've repeatedly written her off one more thing to talk about. *
Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.
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