'Disgusted? You should be.' How Dan the man and the networks blew it, big time

The Media

This may be the age of instant information and ever more finely calibrated statistical readings of public opinion, but when it came to calling the presidential election the big television networks blew it big time.

This may be the age of instant information and ever more finely calibrated statistical readings of public opinion, but when it came to calling the presidential election the big television networks blew it big time.

Twice in one evening, they predicted the election outcome wrongly. As it became clear that Florida's 25 electoral votes would become the key to either candidate's hopes, the state was awarded first to Al Gore - making him the hot favourite for victory. Then it was deemed too close to call, then it was given to George Bush - apparently sealing the presidency for the Republicans - then deemed too close to call all over again.

Although the most spectacular, this was not the only mistake they made. In a handful of key races, notably a Senate seat battle in Washington state, they called results one way only to later retreat, at least temporarily.

Anchors on the three main broadcast networks - ABC, NBC and CBS - as well as cable stations from CNN to MSNBC, were unable to decide whether to exult in the high ratings the roller-coaster was garnering, or apologise for violating the trust that many people, including the staffs of the two main campaigns, put in them.

"If you're disgusted with us, frankly, I don't blame you," said a typically blunt Dan Rather on CBS at one point.

Part of the confusion arose from the sheer closeness of the election race. Unusually, there was no easily discernible pattern nationwide, no palpable swing in one direction or another. As Howard Kurtz wrote in yesterday's online Washington Post, referring to the famously erroneous newspaper headline published after the nailbiting 1946 presidential election: "It was 'Dewey defeats Truman' for the cyber age."

The chaos was also, however, a result of the changing news landscape in the era of the internet and 24-hour rolling news. So high is the pressure to deliver news, almost before it has happened, that mistakes become inevitable.

All the networks took their exit polling data from the same source, an organisation called the Voter News Service, but it was up to each of them to decide what to do with the material. In the case of Florida, several factors were overlooked, from the different time zone in the the state's conservative far north-west to the"faulty data" in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area.

In an era of greater journalistic integrity, careers would have been chewed up and spat out by the shenanigans of Tuesday night. "Unless there is a terrible calamity," ABC's Peter Jennings declared at 2.15 am, Eastern time, "George W Bush, by our projections, is going to be the next president of the United States." Mr Gore took him and other anchors so seriously that he telephoned Mr Bush to congratulate him and was on his way to deliver his formal concession speech before new data made him change his mind.

But Election Night 2000 was also a scenario so gripping it could not have been made more exciting if it had been made up. In this era of tabloid news values and instant gratification, what could be more thrilling than a race that twists and turns indefinitely, that trumps every certainty, that give a dead man a Senate seat from Missouri and that, by yesterday, came down to a few hundred votes, some of which may or may not still be concealed inside two locked ballot boxes at electorally crucial locations in Florida? Dan Rather may have been embarrassed, but he also called the race "hotter than ice cream in a microwave" and "wobblier than cafeteria Jell-O". It may not be good political reporting, but it was great entertainment.