TV News Badly Embarrassed by Bad Calls

They had said this was their Super Bowl, the biggest single planned event in the TV news world, and at 2:17 a.m., a group of bleary-eyed CNN news executives were staring into the end zone. The anchors had been covering the election for nine hours straight when a shout went out across the newsroom: “MSNBC’s called it! MSNBC’s called it!”

All eyes flashed to the nearest TV screen and tension rose in the glass-walled control room, where CNN’s political director Tom Hannon and other executives bent over computers, furiously scanning voter projection data from Florida. Hannon, who had already called this race the wrong way once and changed his decision, hit the button on his mike.

“CNN’s calling it for Bush,” he said a minute after the MSNBC announcement. “CNN is calling the presidency for Bush.” The earpiece chirped in Bernard Shaw’s ear and the red “on air” light blinked on. “We have breaking news . . . ,” the television anchor announced.

If there was one unforgettable image of election night 2000, it was the media’s stumbling performance in projecting Al Gore to be the winner in Florida, then retracting the projection, then awarding the state--and the election--to George W. Bush and finally, amazingly, reversing itself yet again, saying the presidential race was too close to call.

Network executives, driven by intense pressures to be first with the crucial projection, said Wednesday that they were working with flawed data and did the best they could. Still, the TV news world was badly embarrassed by its performance, a feeling summed up by NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, who said: “We don’t just have egg on our faces. We have an omelet.”

Indeed, a host of critics believes the media failed the public with their erratic predictions and also roiled the campaigns of Bush and Gore, causing them to schedule, delay and finally give up on election night appearances. Amid the confusion, Gore phoned Bush to concede the election, then withdrew his concession as the Florida vote got closer.

“This was not television’s finest hour,” said Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center for Media and Politics at Harvard University. “The networks were in a race to be first with projections, and they did not use common sense. When it came time to project Bush the winner, they were like lemmings cascading over the cliffs together.”

The timing of the Bush victory projection was telling: Five networks made the call within four minutes of each other. Fox News Channel was first from the gate with a call at 2:16 a.m. EST. ABC was the last to do it at 2:20 a.m.

At the heart of the controversy was the network’s reliance on exit polls and tabulated voting data provided by the Voter News Service, an organization that receives and then filters raw polling data from the National Election Service. The networks share these data, and in each case Tuesday night, executives say they made decisions about Florida based on numbers that, quite simply, were wrong; first giving Gore a seeming victory, and then awarding the state to Bush.

In the first instance, the networks made the faulty call based on a combination of three waves of VNS exit polling data and early returns suggesting that Gore was up by as many as 5 percentage points; in the call for Bush, news organizations relied on about 85% of the tabulated vote, which showed Bush leading in the state by a margin of about 50,000 votes.

At the time, both predictions “looked pretty solid,” said Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections for NBC News. “But there’s always a chance, albeit a small one, that we’re going to be wrong.” He explained that, in the projection for Gore, the data had too many Democratic voters to be an accurate sample. In the second case, returns indicated that Bush was piling up a hefty lead, but then the gap between him and Gore suddenly narrowed to fewer than 700 votes as ballots were tallied in some heavily Democratic areas.

In a statement, VNS officials said that, while exit polls and other data gave Gore the lead, the organization did not believe it was enough to call the race with confidence. As for the excessive numbers of Democratic voters in the VNS sample, officials said, “we will investigate why [the polling models] did not work properly in this specific situation.”

“On both projections, as soon as we saw there was trouble with the data, we immediately pulled them back and told our viewers why we were doing this,” said Al Ortiz, executive producer of CBS news special events. “And all of us in the news media, as it turned out, were in the same boat.”

Should they have been more prudent? There were ample warning signs that the data used by the networks needed careful scrutiny, according to GOP pollster Frank Luntz. More than most states, he explained, Florida has had a huge influx of new residents since the last presidential election, and a large number of elderly people have died in that time.

“Precincts have changed dramatically from four years ago, and you can’t use prior election models in Florida to make a rush projection,” he said. “But the networks are all about competition, and the real facts get lost in the shuffle.”

As uncertainty grew over who had actually won Florida, some commentators, such as CNN’s Judy Woodruff, acknowledged television’s role in the confusion. But others seemed oblivious: “Sip it, savor it, Photostat it, hang it out on a wall,” said CBS-TV’s Dan Rather at 2:18 a.m. EST. “George Bush is the next president of the United States.”

Hours later, network executives fumbled for an explanation about how they could botch projections of Florida’s balloting, the election’s most closely watched state, twice in one evening.

“We are examining all the facts of what occurred and plan to make recommendations to ensure that this never happens again,” said Jeffrey Schneider, vice president for media relations at ABC News.

Other networks promised similar internal checkups. But for now, several officials said they remain mystified how the faulty data crept into the VNS samples that they all relied on.

Making both calls in Florida “wasn’t really pushing the envelope that far,” said NBC’s Gawiser. “We were all being cautious about Florida because we knew how important it was to the ultimate outcome of the presidential election.”

And there was little thought to junking such projections, he added, “because these are all tools to help us help the viewers. If we don’t do these, we’re going to have an awfully long time on election nights just waiting for final vote tallies to pile up before you know the final result.”

As CNN’s Shaw projected Bush the winner early Wednesday morning, the anchorman’s face was flashed on a huge TV screen in front of the Texas Capitol. Thousands of supporters who had been standing for hours in a drenching rain cheered his words, confident that victory was at hand.

But behind the scenes at CNN, doubts began growing. While they had called the race for Bush, Gore refused to concede. And now Bush’s once-imposing lead suddenly began to dwindle.

As the gap narrowed, Sid Bedingfield, the CNN executive vice president who produced the election broadcast, was a bundle of stress. “How do we show it?” he shouted in the control room at 4:03 a.m., as the TV networks began one by one to pull back their projections. “Do we make it yellow again?” he asked, referring to the color on the map depicting unresolved states.

Back in Austin, the crowd grew hushed once again. Finally, the networks agreed, the race was just too close to call.

Even as questions lingered about the reliability of the VNS polling consortium’s data gathering and reporting, some executives privately acknowledged their share of the blame.

“It’s our responsibility to evaluate” the data, said one network honcho. “I don’t think we can all say it’s completely their fault.”

TV news veterans--who never had to compete with 24-hour news channels or the Internet--echoed that concern.

“Boy, they’ve [networks] got some explaining to do,” said Walter Cronkite, the former CBS newsman. “They bear all the responsibility. VNS information is . . . dumped on the desk of the individual broadcasters. It’s up to them . . . .”

Still, he said, “I don’t think it should shatter people’s confidence” in the press because the blown call was “a rare aberration.”

*

Times staff writer Jeff Leeds contributed to this story.