A television critic’s view of Super Tuesday

In the interest of staying loyal to our peeps here in Philadelphia, here is Inquirer television critic Jonathan Storm’s view on Tuesday night’s coverage. It is – in a word – scathing:

It took ABC’s Charles Gibson two seconds to state about Super Tuesday: “Never in American history have we seen anything like this.”

And two minutes to say it again.

No matter how many times the legions of Aunt Blabbys and Uncle Blah Blahs reiterated the thundering importance of the vote Tuesday night, none of the six networks covering it was really ready to make sense of everything.

But how could they have done it any differently? If you consider that the only important number – delegate count – absolutely couldn’t be available until after every vote was counted and each state had a chance to apply its formula for apportioning them (at least on the Democratic side and with some Republican states), the only thing the networks had was raw voter numbers.

Perhaps they should have used their bully pulpits to spend a little more time explaining the process in each state. Then again, that might have turned out to be as sure a way as any to get people to flip over to Food Network.

Update: Link to review added above.