Situation Room: “Impressive Technical Achievement & Colossal Bore”

The highlights from Slate’s Dana Stevens‘ evisceration of The Situation Room:

> Its “main claim to innovation is twofold: It’s live, and it’s three hours long. This unusual combination means that the show manages to be at once an impressive technical achievement and a colossal bore.”

> “There’s a lot of Terminator-style graphics pulsating around the edges of the screens, as digital clocks tick off the exact time in different parts of the world. In Vienna, Austria, it’s 11:03:01 a.m.! In Crawford, Texas, it’s 2:03:25 p.m.! Stuff is happening in different time zones, and we here in The Situation Room plan to glancingly refer to at least some of it!”

> “Blitzer likes to talk about the flow of information ‘streaming in’ and the ‘data coming in in real time … happening now.’ (Unlike those other news programs, which prefer to choose events that happened on some random day in the past.)”