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The Situation Room
The Situation Room
Format	News Program Live Action
Starring	Wolf Blitzer and various contributors
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	Unknown
Production
Running time	180 minutes (4-7 p.m. ET)
Broadcast
Original channel	CNN
Original run	August 8, 2005 – Present
External links
Official website
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

The Situation Room is an afternoon/early evening newscast on CNN hosted by Wolf Blitzer that first aired on August 8, 2005. The show replaces three politics and hard news programs (Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics, Crossfire (cancelled on June 3, 2005) and Wolf Blitzer Reports).

At first, the newscast aired live from 3-6 p.m. ET and was subdivided into an hour devoted to politics, an hour devoted to security, and an hour devoted to international news. However, on November 2, 2005, CNN announced that The Situation Room would be chopped up: block 1 would air live from 4-6 p.m. ET, and block 2 would air live from 7-8 p.m. ET (taking over the timeslot held by Anderson Cooper 360 which moved to 10 p.m. ET). Lou Dobbs Tonight aired between the two blocks. Effective 5 November 2007, the show reverted to a single 3-hour block from 4:00-7:00pm ET to give more focus to the presidential election scheduled to take place 1 year from that date. Lou Dobbs Tonight has moved up to 7:00 pm ET.

A number of CNN journalists and pundits often join Blitzer, including Jack Cafferty, Ali Velshi, Carol Costello, Jacki Schechner, Abbi Tatton, Paul Begala, Bay Buchanan, James Carville, and J.C. Watts.

The show begins with the following (or a variation of this) phrase: To our viewers: You're in the Situation Room - where news and information are arriving all the time. Standing by: CNN reporters across the United States and around the world to bring you the days top stories. Happening Now ... I'm Wolf Blitzer, and You're in the Situation Room.

The Happening Now statement to introduce the day's top stories is a remnant from the show's primary predecessor, Wolf Blitzer Reports.

The show has garnered criticism for devoting excessive coverage to human interest stories, notably devoting almost an hour of commercial free coverage to a story about a virus affecting their Windows 2000 computers.^{[citation needed]} Much of the criticism comes from satirist Jon Stewart, who has mocked the reporting of the show on multiple occasions, creating his own "hypothetical situation room". On the August 1, 2007 edition of The Daily Show, Stewart showed a clip of Blitzer seemed surprised to learn the salary of the Vice President of the United States comes from the United States Senate; this was juxtaposed with a clip from The Situation Room in which Blitzer spoke with a journalist who reported that very fact. Stewart sympathized with Blitzer's perceived inattentiveness, exclaiming, "Have you seen The Situation Room? It's unwatchable!!!" However, the show also earned critical praise for its multiple-screen coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Saturday Night Live would later lampoon The Situation Room following the fallout from the death of Anna Nicole and its excessive news coverage of the story in early 2007.

The Situation Room differs in some ways from similar cable news programs. For instance, use of eight video screens requires extra coordination. Two control rooms are used: One is exclusively used for the show itself, while the second is used to maintain content in the large eight-panel video wall. The show also makes use of live RSS feeds that scroll in the background at various times during the show. Live video feeds are commonly present in the show's format. The show is broadcast live from CNN's studios in Washington D.C.

• Official site