none of this was in the script. the presidential election had obsessed the news media for a year and a half. the rise of donald j. trump from reality host to presidential nominee had been wall-to-wall on television news. but during election-night coverage, it seemed that hardly anyone involved, deep down, had truly prepared for the possibility that the candidate they fixated on for months might become president. early in the evening, in fact, it didn<u+2019>t even seem as if mr. trump<u+2019>s campaign saw it coming. before the first polls closed, the tea leaves were spilling and recriminations starting. the trump campaign manager, kellyanne conway , told msnbc<u+2019>s chuck todd that the campaign was disappointed not to have had more support from the republican establishment. cnn<u+2019>s jim acosta quoted a senior trump adviser as saying, <u+201c>it will take a miracle for us to win.<u+201d> it looked like we would all get to bed early. you could see the wheels coming off the narrative on cnn at about 8:15 p.m. as john king ran down the vote in florida <u+2014> which seemed about to deliver an early knockout punch for hillary clinton <u+2014> the vote totals suddenly shifted to mr. trump on mr. king<u+2019>s touch-screen <u+201c>magic wall.<u+201d> wolf blitzer interrupted the analysis to excitedly point out the lead flittering back and forth, back and forth. as the hour went on and none of the expected battleground states were called, shock settled into studio after studio. it was as if an asteroid had hit. the polls leading to election night had shown an advantage for mrs. clinton. as the actual returns came in, the newsrooms seemed rudderless. said brian williams on msnbc: <u+201c>no one has the advantage of information tonight. no one has an inside read, a private poll.<u+201d> there may have been a failure of polling. but what was on display across the news media was really a failure of imagination. cable news (among others) spent a year and a half covering mr. trump as a colorful celebrity populist-nationalist. but whether from cultural alienation <u+2014> coastal journalists are not mr. trump<u+2019>s target demographic <u+2014> or over-reliance on received political wisdom, they didn<u+2019>t seem to accept that he honestly might win. so all that blanket coverage left the audience with little impression of what a trump victory might actually mean <u+2014> either in policy or in its potential to reverse the republicans-in-disarray narrative by giving the party all three branches of government. and many cable personalities seemed, tuesday night, to be considering it themselves for the first time. as fields of undecided yellow and gray metastasized across the network maps, television tried to feel its way into the new world. mr. king worked his touch-screen like a wizard, flitting across a dozen states and more, boring down into counties, feeling for pockets of unreturned votes. there was no sudden finish. the writing just slowly spread across the magic wall, and the media went through the looking glass. take fox news. in an earlier era, the network might have had a buzz of jubilation at the republican candidate succeeding. but fox had a complicated relationship with mr. trump, who feuded with megyn kelly while having a bromance with sean hannity. the mood on the network was upbeat but laid-back. ms. kelly even reprised the visit she made to the network<u+2019>s decision desk in 2012, after the republican strategist karl rove questioned the network<u+2019>s call of ohio for barack obama. but this time, she paid a visit to see if the network would be able to make a call at all that night, as several close states clung stubbornly. (mr. rove, meanwhile was luxuriating in the success of his super pac in the senate races.) by the time cbs<u+2019>s stephen colbert began his live election special on showtime at 11 p.m., the night<u+2019>s direction was clear. but it was plain that mr. colbert had planned his monologue for a different outcome. <u+201c>donald trump promised to build a wall and hispanics want him to pay for it,<u+201d> he said. the jokes already felt like relics from another time, the host shaken. by midnight, though, pensive and nursing a cocktail, mr. colbert turned his open despair at mr. trump<u+2019>s victory into a moving reflection on what the election<u+2019>s rhetoric had done to us. <u+201c>we overdosed especially this year,<u+201d> he said. <u+201c>we drank too much of the poison.<u+201d> that poison had saturated cable news. the campaign headlines <u+2014> about immigration, nationalism, islam, sexual assault, the k.k.k. <u+2014> divided the electorate and the pundits rawly along racial and gender lines. on cnn, the commentator van jones<u+2019>s voice caught in his throat as he spoke about mr. trump becoming the most powerful man in the world <u+2014> not a political argument so much as a moral horror. <u+201c>it<u+2019>s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us,<u+201d> mr. jones said. <u+201c>you tell your kids, don<u+2019>t be a bully. you tell your kids, don<u+2019>t be a bigot. you tell your kids, do your homework and be prepared. and then you have this outcome, and you have people putting children to bed tonight, and they<u+2019>re afraid of breakfast. they<u+2019>re afraid of, how do i explain this to my children?<u+201d> for such a noisy campaign, it was a quiet, gradual, unsettled ending. the networks carried live shots of the stricken crowd of clinton supporters in manhattan<u+2019>s cavernous jacob k. javits center. mrs. clinton never appeared, sending her campaign manager john podesta to say a few words on her behalf. there was a sense of <u+201c>what just happened?<u+201d> even among mr. trump<u+2019>s on-air advocates, not to mention the journalists and politicos who had just seen their rule book shredded. <u+201c>tonight, data kind of died,<u+201d> said the <u+201c>never trump<u+201d> republican strategist mike murphy. and unlike so many nights this election, this one went on for hours without the voice, in person or on twitter, of its braying protagonist. mr. trump kept quiet until, around 2:40 a.m., mrs. clinton reportedly called him to concede. mr. trump, who rocketed through the primaries on the jet fuel of his rally incitements, took a soft tone. <u+201c>we owe her a major debt of gratitude,<u+201d> he said of the woman whom he labeled <u+201c>crooked<u+201d> and threatened to imprison during a debate the month before. and the man who began his campaign condemning mexicans as rapists and murderers spoke of building not a border wall but infrastructure. <u+201c>we are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,<u+201d> mr. trump said. from the crowd, someone answered with an angry, unintelligible yell about president obama. that outburst wasn<u+2019>t in the script, either. but that rhetoric is, whatever tone the former <u+201c>apprentice<u+201d> host struck for one night, part of our new unscripted reality.
a rudderless night, as news networks struggle with a surprise victory
james poniewozik