My favorite part of election night 2004 was when Edwards came out at like 4:00 in the morning to give a pep talk to all the dispirited Kerry supporters. That's about as helpful as he was during the entire campaign.
It's the top of the hour --- what's our poison?
Yep, it was a perfect example of the Dems reliance on a cooperative media. Kerry/Edwards knew it was over by then. They needed to buy time for the lawyers to tell them whether they could pull another Gore. Edwards comes out and gives the MSM their talking points.
As I recall, when Edwards appeared it started pouring down rain as more and more of the audience shrunk away. If that had been a Republican, the media would have gone into overdrive working the metaphor for collapse. But they had their marching orders and dutifully backed off calling Ohio/Nevada/NM/Colorado for Bush.