Swearing in, swearing off
Network news chiefs pledge to improve coverage and to hold off projecting states until all that state's polls are closed
By Paige Albiniak -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/18/2001 7:00:00 PM
News networks will change the way they cover elections to ensure that they never repeat the mistakes they made on election night 2000. That was the message from major news network chiefs to the House Energy and Commerce Committee last Wednesday.
Those changes include agreeing to no longer project winners in a state until all the polls in that state are closed and improving the much maligned Voter News Service, which they intend to continue using. They also supported uniform poll-closing legislation.
While the heads of ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press all made the trip to Washington for the hearing and clearly took responsibility for wrong calls on election night, they took offense at allegations made by Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.) last November that their election coverage was politically biased toward Democrat Al Gore.
"I am absolutely certain that political bias played no role in NBC's election-night reporting," said NBC News President Andrew Lack, a sentiment echoed by all the executives, who were asked by one of the committee to respond individually to the charge.
AP President Louis Boccardi made the point that his organization did make one wrong call-Florida for Gore before 8 p.m. ET-but did not lead or follow the networks into the second call-the presidency for Bush around 2 a.m. ET.
Last November, Tauzin noted that the networks had called several close states for Gore within minutes of poll closings but had waited much longer before they called close states for Bush. Although Tauzin later said he did not believe intentional political bias had occurred, he continued last week to assert that statistical bias had favored Democrats.
Paul Biemer, a statistician with Research Triangle Institute, agreed that exit polls tend to skew Democratic, largely because Democrats are more likely to stop and talk to interviewers.
As Fox News CEO Roger Ailes put it: "When Republicans get approached when they come out of the polls, they tend to tell you, 'It's none of your business, 'but Democrats want to share their feelings."
Besides disliking Tauzin's implication of intentional bias, Ailes took issue with Tauzin's decision to hold an oversight hearing rather than a legislative hearing. The oversight hearing required every witness to be sworn in.
"I am.disappointed that this Committee views its role as adversarial, requiring us to take an oath as if we have something to hide. We do not. With or without a swearing-in photo op," Ailes said, "we will hide nothing."
That said, the news chiefs made no bones about taking responsibility for the wrong calls.
"We are embarrassed by those errors, and we are intent on avoiding them and making sure they don't happen again," Lack said.
"I apologize for making those bad calls. It will never happen again," Ailes said.
In terms of changes, all the news heads said that, although exit polls failed them in the case of Florida, they'd keep using them. "We wouldn't use exit polls if we didn't think they increased the accuracy of our reporting," said ABC News President David Westin.
Academics testifying at the hearing supported the legitimacy of exit polls. "They are very valuable tools for students of political science," said Ben Wattenberg, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a researcher who worked on CNN's independent report.
But the news chiefs also said they would rely on many other methods of predicting elections besides exit polls and VNS. ABC's Westin noted that his network has no across-the-board standard for when to make a call but weighs a number of factors, including the experience of those on the decision desk.
CNN is going to fund a backup system in sample key precincts in close races, said CNN Chairman Tom Johnson.
The networks also will make sure that the AP's independently gathered data is included in the in the VNS system for consideration.
Several other election-night changes include keeping the decision desks separate from the newsroom to avoid being influenced by the competition, and explaining more carefully to viewers how they determine when they can "project" or "call" election results in any state.
Although the network heads apologized and promised to put new systems in place, it was clear that Republicans were pointing at the networks while Democrats were focusing on reports that votes of African-Americans were suppressed and discarded, fundamentally changing the election result in Florida and perhaps accounting for the failure of exit polling to provide an accurate picture of voter preferences in the state.
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