he nation awoke yesterday to a presidential election hanging in the balance. The TV networks awoke to a painful hangover.
After the networks' disastrous Tuesday night four-step - in which Florida's decisive 25 electoral votes were credited to Al Gore, then retracted, then awarded to George Bush, and then pulled back again - a full-scale search for blame and answers ensued yesterday.
The Voter News Service, a consortium of media outlets that conducts the exit polling and vote counts that drive election-night predictions, issued a statement saying the initial call for Gore was made when ''reports of actual votes from sample precincts'' supported exit poll results showing Gore with a small lead. The late call for Bush, it added, ''was made solely on the basis of the tabulated vote which indicated that Bush appeared to have a sufficient lead.''
''These models, based on sampling precincts, have served us well through many elections,'' the statement added. ''However, we will investigate why they did not work properly in this specific situation.''
''Right now, ABC is carefully reviewing what happened last night. We take it very seriously,'' said ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider. ''We're reviewing all of the facts, and when we know all the facts, we're going to recommend ways to ensure that it never happens again.''
Others were less measured about the networks' performance.
''They did not seem to have any mechanism for making their own judgments about what states they should call,'' said Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. ''The reason they retreated is they have no confidence in their own call.''
Media analyst Tom Rosenstiel worried about ''the absolute pressure to call [election night winners] early because it's good for ratings. They're sort of all in it together.''
The members of the media consortium that subsidizes the voter service - ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press - all take pains to explain that they evaluate that data and call winners independently of each other. But with the exception of the AP, which, once they declared Florida was back in play never did call the state for Bush, they moved in near lockstep on Tuesday night and early yesterday morning.
All the TV news operations put Florida in the vice president's column around 8 p.m., deemed it too close to call about 10 p.m., awarded it - and the White House - to Bush at about 2:20 a.m., and once again characterized the state as a tossup between 3:30 and 4 a.m.
Once upon a time, networks did their own exit polling. Yesterday the Voter News Service, which was established in the early 1990s to pool information and help save money, was at ground zero of a major journalistic disaster.
''It was sort of an inevitability,'' Rosenstiel said. ''I think if they [still] had multiple exit polls, this wouldn't have happened.''
On Election Day, the service supplies its clients with several waves of exit polls that contain demographic material and information about how and why voters behave as they do. It also provides an actual vote count from certain precincts after the polls close. According to AP's director of election information Tom Jory, the Voter News Service monitored the vote at 626 Florida precincts on Tuesday, out of about 5,800 voting places.
The media organizations use that information with the proviso that they won't call winners until the vast majority of polls close in a state. In each case, the consortium members have their own teams of experts and analysts who evaluate the data, measure it against historical election models, and decide, in a collaborative effort, when to call a race or a state.
At the AP, the Washington bureau is involved in the crucial predictions. At ABC, Carolyn Smith, director of the political unit, is primarily responsible for the call. At NBC, director of elections Sheldon Gawiser is the main man. At Fox News, John Ellis heads the team that announces the winners and losers in consultation with Fox News executive producer Marty Ryan and vice president for news John Moody.
Yesterday, many of the principals were trying to sort out what had gone wrong in the Sunshine State. ''I think it was just a real data problem,'' said CBS spokeswoman Kim Akhtar. ''That tabulated vote [from VNS] was wrong. The data was incorrect.''
''About Florida last night, I think the three of us spoke about 150 times,'' says Ryan of his deliberations with Moody and Ellis. ''When it was Gore the first time, we agonized about it... It just didn't fit with the way we had analyzed the race before it began.''
After Tuesday's incredible snafu, there's already plenty of talk about making sure the viewers, voters, and anchors don't get fooled again. But solutions seem more scarce.
''I think this is going to put a big scare in them,'' said Rosenstiel. ''You could wait for more real votes to come. You could confer sub rosa with the campaigns who do their own polling.''
Jory voiced his support for a return to ''the standard journalistic approach to things, that you don't report assumptions.''
''I think at the end of the day, it's going to turn out that Florida was too contested and was always too close to call,'' ventured Ryan. ''Sometimes it's really that close. Sometimes you may need all of the data'' to accurately predict a winner.
