CBS, NBC Fault Bad Data for Election Woes

CBS News, releasing results of its investigation into what went wrong with its four bad election-night vote projections, said it accepted responsibility but pinned much of the blame on errant data from Voter News Service, some of which was provided erroneously to the exit polling service by states themselves. CBS said it also relied in some cases on too little information. And in the case of its projection of Florida for Gov. George W. Bush that was later retracted, CBS said it didn’t pay attention to what its own correspondent was reporting on air.

The internal report rejected the charge that competitive pressures to call a winner led to some of the mistakes. The mistakes, the report said, were due to “a complicated set of circumstances that convinced the analysts they were on solid ground.”

Late Thursday, NBC released a summary of its own investigation, which also placed blame on bad VNS data, and similarly recommended that NBC News in the future use additional sources of information to counterbalance any possible VNS errors. “At this point, we find no reason for NBC not to continue to make projections in elections,” the report said. “But these projections should be made only after NBC is satisfied that stringent conditions are met and that significant improvements are made in the way election data is collected and analyzed.”

Both reports reject charges that the election night errors were politically biased. “We have concluded that there is not evidence of either intentional or unintentional bias in the timing of the calls,” according to the CBS report.

CBS News President Andrew Heyward said the 87-page report, which the network has posted on its Web site, shows that “this election was unique in so many ways and it exposed flaws in a system that had been very accurate up to now. The Swiss watch didn’t work on Mars, so we’re going to build one that does.”

The CBS report was compiled by two CBS News executives and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Due to problems with the statistical model at VNS, which is a consortium owned by the networks and the Associated Press, the report concludes that the night’s first error--calling Florida for Vice President Al Gore--likely couldn’t have been avoided. However, the later, retracted call of the state for Bush could have been avoided, the report says, had CBS paid more attention to information from other sources, including the Florida secretary of state’s Web site, AP vote tallies and reports from CBS’ own correspondent. Retracted calls in New Mexico and Washington (both of which later proved to be accurate) were due to bad data and relying on too little information so the network didn’t have checks and balances.

Among the report’s recommended changes that CBS said it will implement is no longer projecting a state’s winner until all the state’s polls have closed, a step also taken recently by ABC, NBC and Fox News Channel. In some states with multiple poll-closing times, however, including those where the state’s official Web site starts reporting results before all polls close, CBS said it will still characterize races, if not actually projecting a winner.

Although the report concludes that it is impossible to prove that calling states before all polls close has an impact on remaining votes, “there’s obviously a perception that it is deleterious,” said Heyward, explaining why CBS decided to adopt the new policy. “It’s a political and public relations issue. We’re not interested in affecting the news, we want to cover it.”

For states where one candidate has a solid lead but CBS isn’t willing to project a winner, the report recommends using a new category called “leaning” to describe the race. “We should be willing to trade the illusion of certainty for genuine credibility,” the report said.

In addition, CBS said it would either invest more money in VNS, or invest in a new consortium. CBS will also invest additional resources on the ground in key states with close races. NBC likewise said it is evaluating its VNS relationship. VNS said it had no comment on the CBS report and had not yet seen the NBC report.

CBS will also assign an additional member of senior management to the so-called Decision Desk, where projections are made, to more effectively manage the flow of information. The Decision Desk will also be moved into the studio, CBS said, “to ensure that multiple sources are checked before calls are made and that all available information is shared with every part of the CBS News election night operation.” That’s the opposite of the tack announced earlier by ABC News, which said it would isolate the Decision Desk to minimize competitive pressures. NBC’s report also recommends isolating the desk.

Echoing ABC News, CBS and NBC said they will disclose in more detail how calls are made and what they are based on, and will more explicitly explain to viewers that they are projections and not actual calls.

Although Jamieson praises anchor Dan Rather for his election night performance, among her recommendations is that the CBS anchor avoid “categorical statements made with certainty until the data warrant them,” referring to Rather’s election night statement that if CBS called a state “you can bank on it.”

The report also said: “The ultimate responsibility for the calls we made lies with us at CBS News. It was we at CBS News who analyzed the data . . . and decided when to make a call.”

Fox and CNN are also conducting investigations. CNN’s report is expected by the end of the month following results of a VNS external investigation.