Press: Fighting the Last War

(3 of 3)

The most tangled polling errors came in California, where almost no one forecast Republican George Deukmejian's 50,000-vote victory over Tom Bradley. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times ran a frontpage story on election morning about the lineup of local politicians vying to succeed Bradley as the city's mayor. The San Francisco Chronicle's first election extra bannered: BRADLEY WIN PROJECTED. While ABC was predicting Deukmejian's victory, its affiliate stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco were using exit polls of their own to call the race for Bradley instead. In the Senate contest, several affiliates used local exit polls to forecast a victory for Democrat Jerry Brown, who actually lost to Republican Pete Wilson 51% to 45%.

At least one TV executive decided that the sound and fury did indeed signify nothing. Al Flanagan, station manager of NBC's Atlanta affiliate, WXIA, cut away from the network coverage to air a 1972 movie, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Said Flanagan: "The election was being force-fed to viewers."

Whatever the merits of the coverage, the victories that really interested NEC, ABC and CBS were not reported on Tuesday night but on Thursday, in the Nielsen ratings. They were a surprise: ABC, which pioneered the use of electronic whizbangery but which seemed low key, almost uninterested on Tuesday night, won with an average 11.8% of all U.S. television households. CBS, despite Rather's supercharged manner and a dazzling array of computer-generated graphics, was second, with 11.5%. NBC, with a presentation about halfway between CBS's dazzle and ABC's drowse (and with a stadium-type Scoreboard that was maddeningly difficult to read) ran its now customary distant third, with 9.3%.

Perhaps the lesson of these figures is that viewers prefer straight information and quiet talk to electronic bells and whistles. Certainly the perfervid claims of drama and import, when events were inconclusive, turned some viewers off. Television is incomparably compelling in covering real action, yet embarrassingly unconvincing when it tries to manufacture excitement. But there were some statistics that defied optimistic interpretations: the three networks together attracted less than a third of U.S. households on average; even among those who were home watching TV, nearly half turned to entertainment instead. Despite all their hubbub and hype, all their reaching for meaning, the networks have not yet found a way to make elections interesting to all of the people, even some of the time.

—By William A. Henry III