Press: Fighting the Last War

For pundits and anchormen, a night of surprises

"Beware the analyst who draws the moral before the tale is told. "

—CBS Commentator Bill Moyers on election night, 1982

The script might have been called "Seven Anchormen in Search of an Author. " The network news veterans who conveyed the results of 494 mid-term races last week were sure that the nation had spoken in unison, sending a clear, concise message to the White House. But the newscasters clashed bafflingly all night about what the message was. From the three networks came an erratic and sometimes puzzling performance, more melodramatic than in past elections and less informative, though the networks now command much greater resources.

To an unusually animated Dan Rather of CBS, it was "gut-check time" and the sweet hour of prayer" for the Republicans. Even before the network formally estimated, at 9:06 p.m. E.S.T., that Democrats could gain 34 House seats (the actual total was 26), Rather summed up, "The message to the President might well be, 'Reverse course.' "

To John Chancellor of NBC, however, the patterns were "very similar to 1980: there is no rebellion that we can find." Added his colleague Tom Brokaw: "The country is not moving to the left sharply or to the right sharply." Concurred Roger Mudd: "If I were Ronald Reagan reading these returns, I would probably stay the course." As the evening wore on, NBC's tone altered somewhat, but it never approached CBS's relish for Republican ruin.

Over at ABC, meanwhile, Ted Koppel divined that President Reagan's economic policies were clearly the issue, and that if Democrats gained even 15 seats in the House, "Reaganomics is going to be in trouble." Frank Reynolds said repeatedly that "Democrats need only five victories to control the Senate," sounding as though he really anticipated that result. David Brinkley, playing the nightlong role of pinprick to his teammates' balloons, muttered his doubts that mild changes of complexion in Congress would much affect what measures were enacted.

To compound the confusion, the networks varied widely on when they were ready to predict a particular outcome. Indeed, NBC lurched into proclaiming the re-election of Republican Governor James Thompson of Illinois barely an hour after the polls closed; ABC and CBS prudently held off all night, and the race was not settled for Thompson until week's end. In at least one contest, all three networks were wrong: they labeled Representative John Hiler, an Indiana Republican, the loser of a seat he ended up keeping by 51% to 49%.

Most perplexing of all, the networks reached their divergent conclusions from parallel evidence: raw-vote totals, samples of key precincts and "exit polls" of people who had just voted. All three networks, moreover, found that voters were about evenly split on the President's overall merits, on the efficacy of his economic programs and on the relative importance of unemployment vs. inflation and Government spending. Where the networks parted company, and went awry, was in judging the meaning of those Polls, or perhaps in believing that any consistent meaning was to be found.