House of Burgess

As I don't have cable any more and all the election night parties I went to Tuesday had MSNBC on I totally missed this story until today. Here's an excerpt from the story on Slate.com:

On CBS, Katie Couric (as calm and confident as she's been at the anchor desk) hosted a sober presentation. Every other set looked like something you'd pick up at a Circuit City in Dubai. Within ABC's airy and glossy Times Square set, Charlie Gibson poked and pinched a touch-screen election map every bit as snazzy as CNN's. NBC and MSNBC leaned more heavily than ever on reports from virtual-reality rooms, their maps and graphs floating in front of some digital recreation of a set from The West Wing. But those gizmos—merely straightforward efforts to present data engagingly—were nothing compared with an embarrassing stunt that CNN first attempted in the 7 o'clock hour.

Wolf Blitzer was in his New York command center standing 10 paces away from a 3-D rendering of a reporter: "Jessica Yellin via hologram in Chicago." The effects were such that she was ringed in an off-purple aura from head to toe (a distance, it seemed, of about 4 feet). This was distracting, perfectly superfluous, and in no way an advance on the good old two-dimensional Yellin to whom we are accustomed. This was just the latest example of CNN's weakness for state-of-the-art technology that shows you little more than its state-of-the-artiness. On the other hand, the moment proved a worthy demonstration of Blitzer's professionalism. As a YouTube commenter quickly remarked, "He is being awfully nonchalant about [the hologram]. I'd be trying to stick my hand through it and all that!" Even in the face of howling inanity, it was a night to play it cool.

My first thoughts on seeing the video of this:
1) What a phenomenal waste of money on CNN's part.
2) The poor woman has apparently been shrunk to miniature proportions and her feet are apparently now AWOL.
3) It really adds nothing to the proceedings and is way more distracting that a simple video feed would have been.
4) Nothing against Ms. Yeller, but unless it's someone I'd really be interested in seeing hologrammed in, like say one of the candidates, there's no reason to make them look like a combination of Princess Lea and a diminutive member of the Lollipop Guild.

How about next time instead throwing money into the furnace that was the the purchase of this technology, CNN hologram me some substantive investigative reporting. That'd really be neat-o.