How Fox News, CNN Reacted on Election Night 2024

On November 6, 2024By Littum

A strange election campaign came to a strange end with Donald Trump claiming victory over Kamala Harris in the presidential race — and Fox News and NewsNation agreed.

“This will truly be the golden age of America,” Trump said in a speech to supporters early Wednesday morning. “This is a great victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again.”

Trump gave the speech in a strange media room where he had not yet been declared the winner by the Associated Press or other networks, but the result was clear.

But man, even though the data wasn’t quite there to call it yet, they were all talking about it as a done deal for Trump. There were many variations on “There are still votes to count” and whatnot, but it died down after a while. Soon, analysts like Van Jones on CNN were saying things like, “It’s not the elite (who) are going to pay the price. It’s people who woke up this morning with a dream and go to bed with a nightmare.”

‘This feels more like 2016 than 2020’

With weeks of pundits and pollsters saying the race was too close to take days to declare a winner, things turned out very differently. There was a strange familiarity about it all. As Chris Wallace put it on CNN: “Right now, it feels more like 2016 than 2020.”

It was and it wasn’t. In 2016, Hillary Clinton should easily defeat Trump. As that night unfolded with a kind of morbid curiosity – did it really happen? – Media had to adjust their coverage on the fly, discard plans and come up with new ones from scratch.

Tuesday night was not like that. In a race that was allegedly too close to call, the surprise wasn’t that Trump won, which was always an obvious possibility, but how quickly the results took shape — this was supposed to take days, mind you. That and the feeling of resignation among the networks. They talked about Harris’s chances the way people talk about someone with a terminal illness who isn’t quite dead yet; you must be careful not to talk about them in the past tense.

“There were things a few weeks ago that I didn’t think could happen,” said Daron Shaw of the Fox News Decision Desk. “I didn’t think Trump could win the national vote. I’m not saying he will, but it’s something nobody thought could happen. … It’s a possibility.”

It didn’t take long for Fox News to rejoice

It didn’t take long for the Fox News panel to start getting excited. Dana Perino complained that Harris hadn’t conceded, despite no other major network calling the race — and despite Trump still not conceding the 2020 race. Later, Kellyanne Conway said she was concerned that Harris supporters reacted violently by using words like “unhinged”. Again, no mention of the riot Trump inspired on January 6th.

We can look forward to four more years of this.

Things started off in typically slow fashion

The day started routinely enough, with networks looking to fill the time until the polls began to close. CNN spoke with one man who said he only voted because his girlfriend said she would break up with him if he didn’t. Then he said he just made it up, thought it was a funny thing to say. If he hadn’t voted, he would have spent the day eating crisps.

The results couldn’t come fast enough.

As they did, it didn’t take too long to realize things weren’t looking good for Harris, who announced late in the evening that she wouldn’t speak until Wednesday.

Brian Williams hosted streaming coverage on Prime Video

On Prime Video, with Brian Williams hosting the first streaming coverage of an election, Abby Huntsman said before the call: “Just look at headquarters, the vibe, the vibe we get when you go to our reporters there. Kamala went home She took home for the night You have bottles at Trump HQ.

Indeed there was, and eventually Trump appeared before the crowd gathered there. It was a far cry from 2020, when Trump prematurely declared victory in a race he went on to lose, a race whose results he still lies about. That speech was vindictive. This speech was more verbose and longer, in the style of his rallies during this election, but he mostly left the vitriol to the likes of Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who barked, “This is karma!” by the quantity.

“There he gives a generally, as far as he goes, unifying and generous speech,” Jake Tapper said on CNN, and here we are already back to judging on a curve.

Toward the end of his speech, Trump recalled what he said were the more than 900 rallies he has conducted.

“I’m never coming to a convention again, can you believe it?” he said.

Be grateful for small favors.

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