Posted on 11/04/2004 4:54:54 PM PST by Pikamax
THE NETWORKS Once Bitten, Twice Tempted, but No Call in Wee Hours By JACQUES STEINBERG and DAVID CARR
t was 2:16 on Wednesday morning when Michael Barone, an analyst for Fox News Channel, wheeled around in his chair and faced the four people charged with calling the presidential race on behalf of the network.
"I just got some spin from Rove on New Mexico,'' Mr. Barone said.
Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist, was urging the network to call that state in the president's favor. New Mexico's five electoral votes would have pushed Mr. Bush over the top, and would have made Fox News the first network to name a winner.
The response from John Moody, senior vice president news-editorial for Fox News and the ultimate arbiter, came swiftly. "Not yet,'' Mr. Moody said.
And so no more crucial state calls would come on this election night at Fox, or at any other broadcast or cable news network. A night that began in near unanimity, born of changes made after the 2000 election night fiasco and of early data from surveys of voters leaving the polls that showed the president headed for defeat, would end in the equivalent of a hung jury, even though all the networks were using essentially the same raw materials of voter surveys and raw vote counts.
By 1 a.m. Wednesday, Fox, NBC and MSNBC had all given Ohio to Mr. Bush, assuring him of at least a tie, but had still declined to call the election. Meanwhile, CBS, ABC and CNN kept Ohio out of the Bush column, giving Senator John Kerry's camp some ultimately misplaced hope that its candidate might yet pull out the victory.
It was the starkest divide among the networks on a long election night that occasionally bucked the conventional wisdom. Here was Fox, for example, so often described - in liberal Web logs and elsewhere - as a broadcast annex of the White House, refusing an opportunity to be the first network to declare the president's re-election. Similarly, CBS News, which has been pounded by the right since it broadcast a flawed segment about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, was more aggressive than the other networks in calling some states for the president, at least in the early evening.
The skittishness of some of the other networks to make early calls, particularly on states assumed to be in the president's column and that ended up there, was rooted in frustration with variations between the voter surveys and the vote tallies. Those concerns were only heightened as news executives worried that a bad call would surely invite comparisons to the 2000 election, when each network bungled its call on Florida.
Still, it was on the question of how to analyze the results from Ohio that the differences among the network "decision desks'' became most apparent.
Fox News, which was the first to call Ohio for President Bush, at 12:40 a.m., did so with relative speed. Huddled around folding tables in a makeshift studio, Mr. Moody and three consultants examined Mr. Bush's lead of approximately 130,000 votes in the state and concluded that it would be virtually impossible for his Democratic opponent to catch up. They based their analysis on the so-called provisional ballots that remained to be counted - to win Ohio, Mr. Kerry would have had to win an overwhelming majority - and on the precincts that had yet to report results, including Republican-leaning Cincinnati.
"We agree,'' said John Gorman, the president of Opinion Dynamics, the network's outside polling unit. "Ohio, Bush.''
Less than 20 minutes later, NBC news officials would reach the same conclusion for roughly the same reasons.
"Our models told us when it was safe to call a state,'' said Allison Gollust, an NBC spokeswoman.
"It didn't matter what other people were saying,'' Ms. Gollust added. "And of course, as it turned out, we were right.''
That is not to say CBS was not tempted to make such a call. At virtually the same moment Fox's Mr. Moody gave the go-ahead, CBS informed its affiliates to stand by for a big announcement. But the network's analysts soon dashed the control room's optimism, arguing that the so-called provisional ballots that Fox had discounted in Ohio rendered Ohio a tossup.
Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, minced no words in explaining the noncall to his audience at 1:30 a.m.
"Having been embarrassed about the Florida calls in 2000, we said that we would rather be last than wrong.''
On Wednesday afternoon, Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, expressed no regret at the network's hesitation.
"Nobody wanted to be in a position of declaring a winner before the candidates agreed to it,'' Mr. Heyward said.
"You notice,'' he added, "that those other networks didn't project a single other state that night - they stayed stuck on 269 - because they knew what we knew: that the election was not going to be decided that night.''
For Fox News analysts, the temptation to call the election outright for Mr. Bush surfaced at 1:50 a.m., nearly a half-hour before Mr. Rove's call to Mr. Barone. A graduate student assisting Fox concluded that Mr. Bush had probably won New Mexico.
But Mr. Moody, the senior vice president, and Mr. Gorman, the pollster, urged caution, pointing to the incongruously low voter turnout and questions over the number of absentee ballots.
Mr. Gorman said on Wednesday afternoon that the pressure of potentially calling the race for the president had not influenced the decision.
"We still can't make the case for New Mexico,'' Mr. Gorman said. "It's razor thin.''
Bill Carter and Randy Kennedy contributed reporting for this article.
Flawed????
try down right lie.
"Not yet,'' Mr. Moody said."
"Not ever," Mr. Moody said, "since we haven't got the OK from the Kerry camp."
I must've missed the part about the Kerry campaign calling their favorite networks and telling them not to give Ohio to Bush.
"But the network's analysts soon dashed the control room's optimism, arguing that the so-called provisional ballots that Fox had discounted in Ohio rendered Ohio a tossup."
Bull. They got a call from the Kerry camp asking them not to call Ohio for Bush and they agreed to help their man.
But as we were all tracking, it was obvious that the actuals were going Bush's way....even in NM before 1 am.....
The MSM is still spinning the news. They did leave out the democRAT calls to not call OHIO.
"You notice,'' he added, "that those other networks didn't project a single other state that night - they stayed stuck on 269 - because they knew what we knew: that the election was not going to be decided that night.''
Bull. The election was decided that night. The networks just refused to do their job, report the news that Bush won.
Has anyone heard how the counting is going in OHIO.....?
This doesn't explain why Fox and NBC refused to call Nevada when it became absolutely clear that Bush won the state. Even CBS, ABC and CNN called Nevada.
Fox and NBC should be taking orders from the raw numbers, not the Kerry and his lawyers. They should not have been intimidated into not calling the election for Bush.
But it all turned out okay in the end.
They sure as hell weren't having any problems calling other states for sKerry with "razor-thin" margins.
Try RICO, and outright collusion in the known forging of military documents to falsely discredit the sitting president in the middle of an election, at a time of war.
Absolute criminal enterprise.
ROTFL!
Argh. I'd have had no problem with this if they were consistent in applying this cautious principle. But they weren't.
It was obvious to anyone watching that blue states were being "called" for Kerry as soon as possible, and red states were being "called" for Bush as late as possible. You'd look at a red state, with a big margin, 99% reporting, and there was just no doubt - if this were a blue state with a Kerry lead, they'd have called it by now.
The other thing I couldn't stand was the deference to the Kerry campaign when it comes to Ohio. Mathematically Ohio was in the bag, but they wouldn't call it. Why? Because the Kerry campaign didn't want them to. The Kerry campaign said to everyone "we're thinking of litigating this thing", so the networks said Whoa, well in that case let's not call it! Um, they should call it when the math shows it's in the bag, not according to the whims of the losing candidate. The losing candidate says "please don't call it, we're thinking up some scheme", so they don't? WTF is that?
And somebody tell me, when the heck is someone going to call Iowa? For crying out loud.
If they are going to write a story about that night they should have been honest and told the WHOLE TRUTH which is Howard Wolfson (Hillary's boy/Kerry mouthpiece) called all the networks and CNN and told them NOT to call Ohio for President Bush which they were more than willing to follow. As usual the New York Times isn't being honest.
I either read this or heard it on Hannity on the radio --
But none the less that is what happened a single democratic operative was able to stop the election coverage -- so allow kerry and his camp to re-group and sue if necessary but all this came to nothing.
Gotta go to work bye
The OM (OLD MEDIA) is still spinning the news.
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