Media coverage of the just concluded US elections could have passed for an entire course on the practice of modern journalism.

Through the electioneering period, journalism students around the world could as well have sat on a roundtable to learn tonnes of lessons, commendable and condemnable, from the way pressmen covered the issues that brought back George W. Bush to the Whitehouse and sent John Kerry into oblivion.

CNN was outstanding on election night.

The American media giant clearly broke uncharted waters in bringing to the world events as they unfolded. What topped the visual minded audience was the wall-to-wall electronic map spread out in New York’s Times Square. They fit all the 50 voting states on the giant wall spread. There, 30 minutes before the first polls closed in the Eastern states, Richard Quest announced to the world that it was about to witness something unprecedented. So it happened that at precisely 7pm Eastern Time, 3am in Nairobi, the doors closed on the first precinct to conclude the 2004 elections. And, instantaneously, CNN had a projection of who had taken the votes there.

Tom Brakaw, anchor of "NBC Nightly News," wrote how this came about. No American media house wanted to relive the Bush-Al Gore debacle on election night 2000, when journalists rushed to judgment based on flawed systems that led to wrong conclusions, tortured explanations and apologies, said Brakaw. So, media guys learned to prepare long and hard, and well in advance. Reporters spread out the entire 9,6 million sq-km of the United States interviewed voters as they left the polls. Then, a forest of analysts fed those results into a web of computers put together by a consortium of news organizations. This instantly availed detailed information so a clear judgment could be made about how the election was likely to turn out in any given state.

That is how it happened that every other minute, an irrefutable projection leaped on CNN’s digital wall in Times Square, as the entire English world watched. And similar minute by minute updates streamed on the broadcaster’s Web site, where netizens could keep track.

The unprecedented scenario is that nobody heard the voice of election officials, the legally constituted body to announce election results. Everybody, including the Whitehouse, seemed to hang on every word and picture that streamed out of media houses. In Nairobi, dozens of guests streamed to the US Ambassador’s residence in the leafy Muthaiga estate to watch with the local American mission election results at a fabulously laid out breakfast. No local channel was tuned into that morning. Grouplets of cabinet ministers, media personalities and academicians, each holding white cups embossed with the American Eagle, grouped around screens of various sizes strategically planted around the ambassadorial residence. All watched CNN.

Going by the swift reactions echoed by world leaders in the subsequent hours, similar scenes evidently replicated the world over.

Why did the entire world stop to watch TV and tune into radio what is exclusively an American affair? For whatever other reason, one -- because America just has a way of stepping into everyone’s space. (Love it or hate it, the American election even swayed stock markets around the world.) Two -- with CNN stretching the entire media spectrum of the English world, people had little other choice for authoritative news on the goings on at the world’s most powerful democracy.

Nevertheless, the apparent preparedness spread beyond American media houses. That morning, BBC World News broadcasted live from Washington, DC. And the broadcaster’s Kiswahili edition ran live updates from their correspondent, Kenyan Joseph Warongo, on the ground in Florida. Even religious channels like Vatican Radio had crew on the ground, talking to a 71-year-old woman who had never voted all her life and had, suddenly, come out to participate in an election that became remembered more for the turnout – a record 125 million-plus.

Yet, the road to the election night did not bear unanimous accolade for the American media in particular. Yes, CNN World News, the version we watch out here in Africa, may have dispatched the London-based Richard Quest to American soil months earlier to bring to the world real people and the issues at their hearts. But the point is not lost on the world that the US media operates purely as a private enterprise.

A visiting American scholar recently said as much in Nairobi. Asked by students of the United States International University if there was any constituted body that governs American media, Wellesley College Professor of Political Science, Alan Schechter, answered with one word – profits. It is because of the preoccupation with profits, said the professor, that the American media decided through the campaign period who needs to be informed. “Candidates have been used to spin the news,” he said.

The end result, said political science professor of 42 years, is that the performance of the media there is today far from the much hyped objective goal. Editors and producers deliberately decide to create or kill news. And each the dozens of media house strewn through the land winds up with a subjective bias.

Meanwhile, we out here are stuck with only once voice – CNN.