In other words, much of the tension-making urgency that has become a standing feature—not to mention a cliche—of cable news coverage is inaccurate at best, fabricated at worst. As Rather and his team prove, when it comes to TV, live need not equal adrenaline fueled. Even live reporting, when TV takes it on—and, as I’ve argued, I think live, breaking-news reporting is much better suited to the Web—can be done in a way that is calm and, in that, authoritative.

And, in that, deferential to the occasion—in this case, an historic election night. Because caution may not be what we crave in the moment—indeed, the words “crave” and “caution” rarely mesh well—but, in the end, the restraining factor (or: the editorial oversight) serves audiences. It pays deference paid to the occasion—and to the facts that will make it. “You want to be cautious,” Rather told me, “because you want to be right.”

It’s a simple maxim, to be sure, but one we miss all too often in the whizz-bang, wham-bam world of TV news. (There was nothing restrained about Jessica Yell-o-gram.) Caution—slowness, restraint, judgment—matter. And live television in particular, Rather says, combined with its large audiences, mean that anchors and other on-air commentators have a particular duty toward restraint. Rather used the world “responsibility” repeatedly during our conversation, along with “respectful” and, yes, “cautious.” On election night, anyway, restraint—especially under the try-men’s-souls impulse that is the desire to blurt out “It’s gonna be Obama!”—is a kind of badge of honor. Caution equals authority. One of the non-folsky aphorisms Rather enjoys quoting is Teddy White’s: “Journalists should concentrate on what has happened and what is happening and not delve into what may happen.”

So, when it comes to Ohio, “we’re cautious with no apology,” Rather tells his audience. He’ll later emphasize—and reiterate the sentiment several times—that “this isn’t just a case of trying to keep you in front of the television.” And he’ll wait until eleven o’clock on the dot—the moment the polls close in California, the moment the AP makes its call—to announce that Obama has won the presidency.

“Quite frankly, the call—that is, ‘Okay, we put everything together’—could have been made even earlier,” Rather told me. But: Caution.

Blogs, in comparison, generally exhibit no such discipline—nor are they, really, under any pressure to exhibit it. Again: speed versus restraint. Nate Silver called the election for Obama—via a posting on FiveThirtyEight, which he typed on his computer in one of the Newseum studio’s small anterooms—at 9:38 p.m. “I actually think it would have been a bit earlier,” Silver told me of the Obama call, “except that our Web site was having problems from getting so much traffic.”

Caution factors into Silver’s equation, too—”after 2000, we had every reason to be very, very careful,” he says—”but it was clear to me pretty early on that McCain’s path was very narrow. And certainly once Ohio got called, you could do the math and figure out that the only way McCain would win was if he won a state like Oregon or something—a state he’d basically not campaigned in. And that seemed very unlikely: States don’t usually reward candidates who ignore them. So, even before I called it, it looked safe to me for Obama.”

That call looked safe to a lot of people. Many other bloggers, trusting in numbers and California’s blueness, had called the election before ten o’clock that night. In other words, they broke news. And they scooped the televised broadcasts.

But, then, bloggers don’t make A Moment—TV does. And A Moment, in the end, was what audiences were looking for that night. It’s what they’re looking for, in fact, most nights. As Brooke Gladstone, assessing election night on On the Media, put it,

When the ball drops in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, people watch it everywhere. It is the definitive marker, the moment the New Year begins. So even though the death of network news is often proclaimed, it’s still got its mojo because Tuesday’s moment wasn’t really about who had access to polling data. All of us had the answer before 11.

What TV had, and what only TV has, is the power to create the moment everyone could share.

There it is. For all the ink spilled in analyzing the social power of the Internet—and the Web certainly has that power—television is still a striking platform for community. It’s a platform for iconic moments, be they of historic import or simple, human serendipity.

The moment everyone could share.

If only TV could see its own strength.

For part one, click here.

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