Election Reflections from Ivory Towers

HEY, YOU DID YOUR BEST FOX

• Lose-iness: The New York Observer's Rebecca Dana spends election night with the fair and balanced crew at FOX News channel, including neo-con legacy William Kristol who quipped off camera that exit pollers were "a bunch of 24-year-old graduate students and retirees."

• Speaking of ...: As those exit polls were beginning to point towards a Democratic victory, the network decided they didn't need no stinkin' exit polls. The Los Angeles Times's Matea Gold writes, "In the middle of its election coverage, Fox News—one of the members of the consortium—announced that it was going to stop relying on the exit-poll data because its decision-desk analysts had discovered a Democratic bias of six to eight percentage points in many areas after comparing the survey results with the actual vote." An aside: presumably the vice president did not insist that all televisions be turned to FOX last night.

• Los Angeles Times, you just lost your editor, Dean Baquet: How do you feel? "People are crushed," the New York Times quotes LAT deputy metro editor Alice Short. "People really believed in Dean and that as long as he was in that front office, we were going to be O.K."

• She who laughs last: It's the day after Election Day, the perfect time for the New York Daily News's Lenore Skenazy to write a jokey column about negative campaign ads. She advises readers to "open your eyes and take the finger out of your throat" now that the elections are over. Maybe you'd be better off waiting till the end of the column to do that.

• We wanted the fake IMs: Monday we said we couldn't wait for the Huffington Post's Danielle Crittenden to do one of her patented fake IM sessions about the neo-conservatives in Vanity Fair. The bad news is she hasn't done it yet. The good news is she has a fake draft of a presidential statement on the elections written by "Tony Snow." Or maybe it's real and she's back in the indiscreet speech-leaking business.