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.
Well, the MSM sure didn't mind calling Wisconsin for the Rats, but now it looks like it may go to Bush on the absentees.
My guess is that his head is still hurting.
For 2008, FreeRepublic out to have our own say in calling the election. When the old media refuses to call it, we can.
they hav estill failed to call NM and IA in most case. IA in all cases. Why I do not know....
I prefer UOM (Useless Old Media).
And that's exactly what they did in 2000...as they called close states for Gore immeidately, while calling overwhelming Bush states later in the evening. Even in this election, they held off on calling Bush wins later supposedly because they were too close to call. Yet, when the final tallies were in, these states went overwhelming for Bush.
I keep wondering if someday the desire to make a profit and not go out of business might cause an MSM network to quit being a Democratic Party auxiliary and look seriously at the Fox model, but so far it hasn't happened. They just sit there watching their audience slowly disappear.
I'm not sure of this, but I speculate this is for the following reason: Some people show up to vote on election day, and the records at the precinct indicate the voter had earlier requested an absentee ballot. The voter states that they never received the absentee ballot, or lost it. They are then given the chance to cast a provisional ballot. The elections office waits until ten days after the election to ensure that all the absentee ballots have arrived by mail. They then check (among other things) to see whether they have received a duplicate absentee ballot from someone who cast a provisional ballot. If there is a duplicate, then the provisional ballot is voided, and the absentee ballot counted. Make sense?
Yes...thanks for the info.
I challenge you to find a more nonsensical comment in this years media election cycle.
Thank you. You saved me having to write this all out. You are 100% correct.
I was up until 3:00 AM Pacific and I watched it all. In one sense it was pathetic. But in the end it was actually comical. The MSM (not including FOX) was apparently thinking that they could still somehow control the outcome. As to FOX - I have no idea what was going through their heads. They missed a great opportunity to show up the alphabet networks.
Yes it all turned out ok and since they would not call it, Andrew Card called it. Now the networks will not be required to make the decision.
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