I watched Fox News for five hours last night - Salon News

On my way toward the prodigious outdoor party that broke out shortly after 11 p.m. on the streets of Fort Greene, the multiracial Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood where I live -- a party to celebrate a moment of generational and political shift in America unlike anything I've ever experienced -- I spent a few hours with a somewhat different demographic. But I'm not here to kick sand in the face of the Fox News Channel. For the first time in its existence, Fox on Election Night 2008 seemed a weak and piteous thing, trying to cover its nakedness with shreds of dignity, and staring mortality right in the face.

And I'm just talking about the commercials. Before Brit Hume informed Fox viewers just past 11 p.m. Eastern, in the dispassionate tones of a physician delivering a grave prognosis, that Barack Obama had been elected president, we got several iterations of a 60-second ad for Plavix, a pharmaceutical "proven to help protect against future heart attack or stroke." This was followed, at least once, by a commercial for another drug (I didn't catch its name) that may relieve symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Along with heart failure and difficulty breathing, we also had some unintentional humor on the road to President-elect Obama's victory address. Much earlier in the evening we were told that Fox's Election Night coverage was brought to us by "Crest -- Whitening Expressions!"

Beyond the medicinal cornucopia, Fox was a pretty stolid, gloomy-Gus affair during the five hours I logged as a viewer Tuesday night, with little of the erratic behavior that accompanied the 2006 midterm elections. OK, there was bargaining and grumpiness and recrimination and reiteration of defunct McCain campaign themes and obsessive focus on tiny shreds of hope (Florida's still-red 13th Congressional District, a Fox fave) and massively boring conversations about the union election rule known as "card check," whatever that is. But sometimes they made Fred Barnes shut up.

From the beginning of the Fox election broadcast at 6 p.m., it was brutally clear that Hume and Shep Smith and Chris Wallace and all their guests and commentators had seen the exit-polling data and were not laboring under the delusion that those numbers reflected some 2004-style miscalculation. Sure, earlier in the day the network had ventilated a certain amount of unfounded racist paranoia, endlessly repeating some footage of a surly-looking fellow outside a polling place in Philadelphia who apparently represented the leading edge of a massive "Black Panther" conspiracy to intimidate white voters. (I guess it worked!)

But in general, the Fox team displayed an oddly jolly professionalism. They seemed determined to take their medicine, with the stick-to-itiveness of a losing football team dreaming of bright days far in the future or the past (and the near certainty that their core audience was going to bed, by the millions, in despair). Though it went briefly wobbly on Ohio, Fox didn't really show any particular reluctance to call states for Obama, and after New Hampshire (at 8:11) and Pennsylvania (at 8:30), its commentators quit pretending there was any serious doubt about the outcome and began arguing about what kind of president Obama would be -- and what kind of country he was inheriting from you-know-who.

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