Tuesday night, every network throughout the United States went all-out trying to cover the 2008 presidential elections, which were won by the Democratic Party’s candidate Barack Obama, who thus became the first non-white American to run the nation.

In an attempt to dazzle the audience, CNN came forward with a new hologram technology. With 25 high-definition cameras on her, the network’s correspondent Jessica Yellin, who was inside a tent set up at Chicago's Grant Park, appeared as if she was on CNN's New York set talking to Wolf Blitzer, an American journalist who has been a CNN reporter since back in 1990. What actually happened was that the cameras duplicated her image the way a flight simulator is able to do, which made it look that she was on the set.

CNN’s surprise achieved its goal of amazing viewers, but some found the hologram technology quite funny and managed to turn it into a joke. A”Star Wars” one, to be more precise. An online parody of Yellin’s coverage of the elections featured the correspondent talking in the same voice as Princess Leia, a fictional character that wanders through the far, far away galaxy from the aforementioned movie’s Jedi-filled universe.

Nevertheless, for the famous television network, bringing forth the hologram technology was a very serious business, since they turned to a California consulting company and also to the Sportvu and Vizrt overseas firms. The former one, an Israel-based company, provided the peripheral tracking system for the live event, while the latter, a software company that specializes in offering solutions for TV stations and various other high-end graphics apps, added the effects to the gadget.

And what all these efforts meshed into turned out to be an apple of discord between various journalists, television network officials and even academics. On one hand, there were some who deemed the hologram stunt CNN pulled as having been an interesting innovation, although as Tom Shales, a TV critic for the Washington Post, stated, it did not have any effect whatsoever on the actual coverage of Barack Obama’s election as the next U.S. president. Nor was it meant to, according to CNN's senior vice president and Washington bureau chief David Bohrman, who said that the hologram technology had been seen by the network as a mere ornament to the Election Day  broadcast.

On the other hand, others refused the gadget any role in the coverage, reckoning that it actually deceived viewers and had also been quite distasteful.

Former CBS News reporter Deborah Potter criticized CNN’s hologram technology, considering that it had been inappropriate for the network to have engaged into a make-believe act instead of showing the real location where correspondent Jessica Yellin was, given that the latter (Chicago's Grant Park, that is) was filled with people celebrating Obama’s victory.

Moreover, Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, stated that Tuesday evening’s main event had been the elections, believing that CNN had picked the wrong time to show off their new cool trick.

Still, despite all the criticism and the downplay that the hologram technology has come into lately, facts are facts. And the fact is that Tuesday night, CNN's audience was almost twice as large as it was back in 2004 on Election Day.