ASHINGTON - The networks' mistaken early calls Election Night that Al Gore - and later George W. Bush - had won Florida were in part because of flawed exit polls in the Tampa area and a ''significant computer error'' in Volusia County's election agency, the CBS News chief told Congress.
CBS News President Andrew Heyward said in a letter to Representative Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Commerce Committee's telecommunications panel, that his network's initial call for Gore at 7:50 p.m. EST on Nov. 7 was based on Voter News Service exit polls and actual vote data, interpreted through tested statistical models.
But at about 9:20 p.m., Heyward said in the letter released yesterday, CBS found that exit poll results in the Tampa area had overstated Gore's lead and that tabulated votes in Duval County were probably wrong. That call was retracted at 9:54 p.m.
When the networks then erroneously called Florida for George W. Bush a few hours later, Heyward said, ''another series of confusions took place - including what at this juncture appears to be a very significant computer error made by the Volusia County Elections Department - which led to another series of bad calls by the television networks and newspapers across the nation.'' That mistake has been traced to a faulty government computer disk.
Tauzin, R-La., is investigating what led to the early election calls, how they affected voter turnout where the polls were still open and whether any inherent biases were involved. Tauzin, planning congressional hearings in January, yesterday released responses from the networks and the Associated Press to a series of questions he has asked in preparation.
CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, CNN, and the AP make up the consortium that uses Voter News Service exit polls and actual results to project election results. The AP never called Florida for Bush but did project, and then retract, the state's critical 25 electoral votes to Gore earlier in the night.
Although Tauzin received responses from all six news organizations, Heyward went into the most detail about what led to the mistaken early Florida calls. He said the matter will be thoroughly reviewed by a three-person panel headed by Linda Mason, CBS's vice president of public affairs.
''We were as good as the information we were getting from sources we trusted,'' Heyward said. ''In this case, that information was not good, and neither were we.''
Executives at ABC, CNN, Fox, and NBC also said they had begun intensive internal examinations of what went wrong.
CNN Chairman Tom Johnson stressed that ''there was no intentional bias in the election night reporting'' at his network.
''Nothing is more upsetting than to make an incorrect projection,'' added Robert C. Wright, NBC's president and chief executive officer.
Johnson announced that an independent panel will review CNN's procedures. Members include Joan Konner, a former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; James Risser, former director of the Knight Fellowship program at Stanford University; and Ben Wattenberg, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
