British Elections

I'll leave it to others to comment on the reasons and meaning of the British elections, but I will say that the BBC coverage of their elections puts our networks to shame. Not only was it better entertainment (why can't we have a Monster Raving Looney Party?) but the analysis was top-notch. Several factors stood out here. First and foremost, Anthony King and Peter Snow are serious students of electoral politics and they got lots of airtime. There's nothing like it in the U.S. In the last election, Stu Rothenberg got a bit of coverage on CNN where he quickly showed a county-level map of Florida (as a shot of a computer screen--not a video graphic) that indicated that Bush was running much better in the central part of the state. That was about all I saw in the way of fine-grain analysis. On the other hand, Snow's maps and swingometers (Yeah, baby!) were all over the place. The networks would do well to copy the BBC coverage for our elections.