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Description
THERE WAS PLENTY OF HUMILIATION TO GO AROUND IN the aftermath of the 2000 elections. Vote counters and ballot designers, election boards and state legislatures all came in for heavy criticism. But special ignominy was reserved for the five major broadcast and table networks and their news operations. The networks that night broadcast multiple incorrect reports, including the premature and still-disputed claim--initiated by FOX at 2:15 a.m.--that George W. Bush had won the state of Florida. "It was the most embarrassing evening in the history of network TV, politically," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "They just embarrassed themselves and failed in the basic public-interest obligation they have come to have over the years."
The great sin of election night 2000, in the view of Rosenstiel and others, was that the television networks had broken one of the cardinal rules of journalism: Never rely on a single source of information when a second is available. That night, two organizations, The Associated Press (AP) and the Voter News Service (VNS), were tabulating vote results across the country. The AP was producing generally accurate numbers, but the network decision desks--the people who decide when to declare winners in different races--were looking only at the VNS data. After all, the VNS was theirs: It was the consortium into which the networks had all pooled money after they abandoned their own separate vote-tabulation projects as too expensive the decade before. Unfortunately, the VNS data were badly flawed. It was the VNS numbers that led FOX--whose data-analysis division that night was headed, incredibly (or incredibly for any place but FOX), by a first cousin of George W. Bush named John Ellis--to call Florida, and thus the presidency, for Bush. The other networks quickly followed suit. The call was retracted hours later, but not until long after it had registered its impact: For the next 35 tortuous days, Bush was the presumed president-elect, and Al Gore the presumed sore loser.
The networks engaged in much public hand-wringing in the weeks that followed the elections. Anyone who remembers a rueful Dan Rather saying,"If you're disgusted with us, frankly I don't blame you," or who saw network executives go to Capitol Hill to explain themselves to Congress could reasonably have assumed that steps would be taken to ensure that such a debacle would not happen again. Network executives later acknowledged that cross-checking the VNS data with the AP's numbers would probably have prevented the incorrect call of Florida for Bush, and they promised to make certain that a single source with bad information could never again create a media-wide failure like election night 2000.
So here we are, just weeks away from November... |
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