Election 2000: TV Makes A Too-Close Call

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By early morning, it was clear Florida would probably decide the election. Network analysts saw Bush's lead in the vote count stretch upward of 50,000 votes, a lead that, given the apparently small number of votes left and the voting history of the districts left to report, seemed increasingly insurmountable. At 2:16 a.m., Fox News called Florida, and thus the presidency, for Bush. Soon every network rolled the President Bush graphics; the crowd whooped in Austin; and Gore called Bush to concede. Newspapers prepared BUSH WINS! front pages that would leave them black, white and red-faced all over. And the error traveled across news websites like a virus (including, for a while, TIME's). "Unless there is a terrible calamity," ABC's Peter Jennings called it, "George W. Bush, by our projections, is going to be the next President."

Ahem: terrible calamity, anyone? For reasons the networks say they have yet to clear up, far more votes than expected quickly came in, including a flood for Gore that closed the gap at one point to around 200 votes. By 4 a.m., punch-drunk anchors reversed themselves a second humiliating time. (In fact, the networks were shown up by new technology: Gore retracted after aides noticed the narrower margin on the Web.) Says Fox News vice president John Moody, "The call of Florida for Gore was not a mistake, it was a miscalculation"--a matter of incorrect data. "The call for Bush was not a miscalculation, it was a mistake. We did it without being sure." On top of all this, New Mexico, which some networks had given to Gore, was declared too close to call on Friday.

Some news veterans blame the blunders on competition. "Making the first call is all a question of network ego," says Martin Plissner, former executive political director of CBS News. "It's a question of whose is bigger." Another problem is noncompetition. Networks share VNS data and then hire analysts, who race to crunch the same numbers. Competing operations might have more incentive to avoid errors--or at least wouldn't multiply them.

The media had not spoken their last on campaign 2000. The morning after the Great Panhandle Mishandle, instead of doing election postmortems, the news industry received a spectacular lagniappe: a fractious postelection campaign, made and played for TV. It was Monica with a side of Elian and a glass of O.J., polarizing and interminable, with disputed facts and plenty of lawyers. Elder statesmen James Baker and Warren Christopher, brought in as recount "observers," held dueling press conferences, like Cochrans and Ramsays. In battles like this, television news is a better divider than uniter: its formats, from Hardball to Burden of Proof, are about opposition. A constitutional crisis became electotainment.

But under the circumstances, electotainment may not be so bad. An electoral crisis like this inevitably leads to anger and feelings of disenfranchisement. A sober, reasoned settlement, theorized on the New York Times editorial page and worked out behind closed doors, may be the quickest route to stability. Or it may leave people reasonably suspecting that they've been sold out by secretive mandarins. Say what you will about the bile-spewing cable culture of call-in shows and town halls, it's all about enfranchisement: zapping your e-mail to CNN or MSNBC, hustling down to a live camera shoot with a homemade picket sign.