Election 2000: TV Makes A Too-Close Call

In a week of general humiliation, there was some good news for the TV networks: they did accurately award Florida to the winner. The bad news: they also awarded it to the loser. Dan Rather assured viewers they could take CBS's election-night projections "to the bank"; then the networks had to make two costly withdrawals. It was, in the words of CBS and CNN election consultant Warren Mitofsky, "embarrassing as hell." Yet it also underscored TV's tremendous power, as the networks' blunders led to Al Gore's concession takeback. And as that wild night set up an acrimonious Florida soap opera played out for the cameras, it revealed the media's dual, contradictory roles: national laughingstock and de facto fourth branch of government.

In part, we in the media were made to look stupid by the same mechanisms we use to make ourselves seem smarter than we are. By midafternoon on Election Day, journalists receive exit-poll data, diced into a zillion demographic categories on whom people voted for and why. Networks use those figures to call states seconds after the polls close (and hint not so subtly at outcomes earlier in the day); print journalists use it to plan election coverage; we all use it to lord our insiderdom over less-well-connected pals. The monopolistic source of the data is the Voter News Service, an exit-polling and vote-counting consortium of the major TV networks plus the Associated Press. (TIME, like many print publications, pays a fee to share in some of the information.) Since the networks set up VNS in 1990--saving themselves a bundle on their own polling operations--the system has worked fairly well, save for miscalling a New Hampshire Senate election in 1996.

But Tuesday night, a piece of bad VNS data came up on the network swamis like a bite of tainted flounder. Exit-poll data showed Gore with a lead in Florida, and after most polls there closed at 7 p.m., early returns, in combination with mathematical "models" of Florida voting, bolstered the data. The networks, led by NBC, called the state for Gore, and pundits all but declared it was time to stick a fork in Bush; he was done. The call infuriated the Bush camp because voters in the conservative Florida panhandle, which is in the Central time zone, still had eight minutes to vote.

An hour and a half later, though, VNS alerted the networks that some of its exit-poll and vote-count information was wrong, and the actual vote started showing a trend for Bush. (VNS declined to answer questions last week, but in a statement said the "small lead" its poll gave Gore was insufficient to call the race alone.) Around 10 p.m., the shamefaced networks declared Florida "too close to call."