Reporters failed in their coverage of 2000 presidential election, panelists say

By Alicia Benjamin-Samuels
freedomforum.org

02.16.01

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Many reporters practiced reckless journalism while covering the 2000 presidential election, according to participants in a Feb. 8 panel on "Media Coverage of the 2000 Election."

The discussion, moderated by John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, included panelists Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists; Bill Phillips, deputy mayor of Nashville; and Deborah Mathis, syndicated columnist and Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Factors that lead to careless media coverage of the 2000 election include media organizations' heavy reliance on the Voter News Service, exit polling, and their rush to be first with the news.

"VNS was strapped for cash and didn't have the kind of staff they had had in the past," said Kovach. The television networks relied on the Voter News Service data instead of hiring knowledgeable reporters to cover the election in the field, he said.

Voter News Service conducts exit polling in precincts all over the country. Most of the networks and local stations use data compiled by the service in their election coverage.

According to Kovach, when a Voter News Service keypunch operator went home at 6 p.m. during the night of the election, there was nobody to replace the worker.

Poor coverage of the 2000 election was influenced by the networks' reluctance to invest the amount of money necessary to cover the event properly, Kovach continued. "For example, ABC got rid of 10 reporters to hire George Stephanopoulos to talk about what might be going on rather than have 10 reporters in the field to talk about what was going on," he said.

Television stations were inaccurately and prematurely predicting the winner of the election and newspapers had television sets in the newsrooms, helping them to decide what they would report, Kovach said. "The New York Times was under pressure to match what was being said on television, so they had an early edition with Bush winning. Nobody really knew who was winning."

Many news organizations rely on exit polling because they want to break the news first, said Mathis.

"You find networks making these calls by a one-minute differential and it's absurd," she said. "Most Americans don't sit at home with 4 or 5 different television sets, so they have no appreciation for the fact that NBC [reported the results of the election] at 7:36 and CBS [reported the winner] at 7:37," Mathis said. The race to get the results out first is an "insider's game," she added. "We don't have to know who the winner is immediately."

"A CNN report shows the exit polling was substantially wrong in six states," said Seigenthaler.

"Exit polling is for the birds," said Mathis. "I see very little use for polling, especially in the political process and especially when put in the hands of the media that has a run-with-it ethic."

Phillips said the news media have started to replace accuracy with speed. "We put out this instantaneous information which we have decided must be accurate because it's so fast."

"Just because we can do it faster, we don't necessary stop to think about whether we need it faster," said Mathis. "It's like climbing the mountain because it's there."

The panelists said other factors that led to chaos in the 2000 presidential election coverage included confusing ballots and a disparity in polling accommodations.

"If television networks are relying on exit polls and a voter tells a reporter that they voted for Gore when they actually voted for Ralph Nader, because the ballot was confusing, then the reporting will be incorrect," said Seigenthaler. "The exit poller skews the results," he said.

Reporters are also missing a story about the difference between polling places in wealthy and poor areas, Mathis said.

"There is a story there to be told about what the accommodations were or were not in poor neighborhoods," said Mathis. Reporters should investigate the validity of claims that some accommodations were shoddier in certain areas, she said.

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