Like many others in Yemen on the 4th November, i bought a bag of Qat, and pulled an all nighter watching the US election coverage on TV zapping between BBC, Sky, Fox News, CNN, Al Jazeera and even France 24.

By far the BBC coverage was the most clunky but i think that was because they had a boatload of guests to squeeze in. The Jeremy Vine touchscreen wotsit made me nauseous. Simon Schama the historian was clearly pissed and close to drooling involuntarily all over the desk. It was great to see John Bolton, the ex USA Ambassador to the UN, getting all wound up by a BBC journalist’s line of questioning at a Republican party event. Dimbleby was all excited and chuffed to be anchoring coverage of ’this, a historical and momentous event’. He also provided much comedy with his Gore Vidal interview. Matt Frei was smooth and the Price chap looked absolutely knackered. Clearly he had been deprived of little sleep having to deliver pointless and vacuous blog entries for the BBC website. You cant help but feel the Beeb missed a trick in not letting loose Paxman for some ’97 UK election style attack dog interviews.

CNN had the best coverage, it was very smooth, some good analysis and great use of the touchscreen wotsits, even if the guy using one of them was too small to touch anything at the top of the screen. Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and John King are absolute pros. Soledad O’Brien was enthusiastic, probably because she had been allowed into the studio and not stuck doing an outside broadcast with a load of undecided voters as she had been during the debates. The most exciting aspects of these elections is the vote count and the reported counties. Hence it seemed that McCain was winning Indiana, but the key Obama leaning counties hadn’t reported their results. John King is the master of drilling down to this level of detail.

Fox was comedy. It was like Britt Hume was commentating on a death whilst having his teeth pulled out. Very subdued, much sighing and a lot of ’if onlys’. Karl Rove was on hand looking slimey and smug as his prediction of Obama breaking 330 electoral votes materialised. Rove is one of those people who like to begin a sentence with ’You probably dont know this, but…’ before launching into some know it all political factoid. Fox had the best totty in the form of Megan Kelly but she was hopeless using the touchscreen wotsit. Interestingly i found their analysis of Obama’s manifesto turn quite positive once it became clear he was going to win. I wonder if Murdoch will be pushing for more favourable editorial seeing as the win for Obama was so convincing.

Sky News from the UK was great. Jeremy Thompson was for some reason located high up in a New York skyscraper which led one guest to make a crack along the lines of ’i know now why it is called Sky News’. Adam Boulton had got himself a haircut after he came on earlier on in the day with a mullet. The Sky Miami White House was, i hope, intentionally tacky and low budget. It provided much amusement in the week leading up to the election. One highlight was the live broadcast of an interview from the sofas of the house with a background view onto a Miami lagoon where a huge boat was slowly making maneuvers to go alongside a pontoon outside. Watching it you didn’t know if someone on board was going to fire a missile into the house or if some huge celebrity was about to get off. As it turned out the boat was going to be used to interview ’floating voters’, boom boom.

Al Jazeera International was a bit boring. As always, you watch it feeling sorry for the presenters who are clearly wondering when they are going to be given the boot.

France 24 was good fun car crash style viewing. Clearly they were desperate to fill space and they had a few odd guests such as historians. I was hoping they would also have wine tasters and cheese makers providing analysis from the studio but it wasnt too be. Naturally most of the guests they had were rooting for Obama and anyone trying with the slightest support for McCain was smacked down. More analysis of TV coverage can be found over here

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