Sharilyn Johnson, a Daily Show fan, went to the live election night show and couldn't get in. She didn't just show up and expect to get in, she had tickets for months, and had confirmed and reconfirmed a few times. She did everything correctly and still she couldn't get in. Out of the 250 people in line that night, only 21 got in. I guess there were a lot of VIP guests that night. The show screwed up. Johnson writes about it at The Huffington Post.

But I'm wondering if she's not overreacting to the entire episode when she says things like this:

I think one of the weirdest things that happened on election night were the hologram thingies that CNN used. It was OK when they showed an image of a building, but it got really strange when Anderson Cooper interviewed will.i.am (almost as weird as me having to write someone's name as will.i.am). Cooper was standing there in the studio, looking off to the side, waiting for am (is that his last name? Or is he one name, like Twiggy?) to pop up in front of him like on Star Trek. The whole thing looked kinda cool but also kinda cheesy, and it was funny when Cooper introduced the interview by saying "we're joined now via hologram..."

Now comes the scandal: they weren't even holograms!

My friends, if you thought the coverage that's been going on since the day after the 2006 Congressional election has been overwhelming, you ain't seen nothing yet. Come sunrise on November 4th the television airwaves will be inundated with election coverage, comment, pontification, and general BS. Red states will become blue, blue states will become red, graphs will be drawn on easel boards with black marker and someone will predict the winner of the entire Presidential election at 7:00:01 p.m.

So, if you are wholly disinterested in the old way that the elections are covered you may want to tune into Current TV, or its website if you don't have the channel on your digital box, for an alternative to get the results you need. In this case, it's you, the couch potato that you are, who will be providing the coverage. It's called "Current Diggs the Election" and the way it works will be unique.

Neither is The Colbert Report, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from categorizing them as such. Including younger people, who always say (according to surveys anyway) that they get their main news from the Comedy Central shows.

But is this true? I mean, don't you already have to know about the people being poked at, the politicians being skewed, the news stories of the day being dumped on, in order to get the jokes? It's not like the two shows explain the stories. They're just humor shows, and you have to watch the regular news so you can get the jokes.

It's not often that TV news executives are well-known, but Gordon Manning was one of those people.

Manning was with NBC and CBS news for several years, involved in many of the top news stories of the 20th century, including the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 for NBC, CBS' Watergate and Nixon's trip to China coverage in 1972, and even set up an interview between NBC's Tom Brokaw and Mikail Gorbachev in 1987, just before his meeting with President Reagan.

Manning was famous for something else we all see now: the color-coded election night map! NBC first did that in 1976.

Manning died Wednesday in Westport, CT of a heart attack.