Panel bemoans TV networks' rush to judgment on Election Night
By Maya Dollarhide
Special to freedomforum.org
05.01.01
NEW YORK — Television news suffered from premature reporting and single sourcing during last year's election-night coverage, a panel of journalists agreed at the First Amendment Center last week.
How else, they said, to explain the debacle of TV networks' announcing before polls closed that Vice President Gore had won Florida — only to retract the report less than two hours later to pronounce the race "too close to call," and hours after that, calling the state for George W. Bush … before withdrawing that judgment as well the following day when America settled into 35 days of waiting for the president-elect to emerge.
"The media was infected by a lot of false projections and even false information," said First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams as he set the stage for "A Recount of Election Night: Freedom of the Press vs. Uninfluenced Votes." The discussion was held April 26 at the First Amendment Center, which co-sponsored the event with the New York City Bar Association's Committee of Communications and Media Law.
"That night things happened that had never happened before. The country is changing dramatically with technology," said journalism veteran Nancy Maynard. "It is a system that does get lazy from time to time."
Maynard, who spent 20 years in newsrooms and is the author of Mega Media: How Market Forces are Transforming News, also said the news media "got too comfortable" with election coverage this time around.
Many believed that the media mishandled the information given to them by Voter News Service, which compiled exit-poll information and provided it to all the major television news organizations.
Lawyer Steve Brill, founder of Brill's Content, noted that media conglomerates had banded together for their newsgathering and that the single sourcing caused immense problems.
"Several very large corporate conglomerates got together and decided they needed to save money, so they went to their news organizations and said, 'You're reporting on the presidential election, and to save money you are going to get together and do this as a unit,' " Brill said.
What some have called "drag-car racing" reporting has also caused problems, the panelists said.
"It was catastrophic," added Jeffrey Toobin, a New Yorker staff writer and legal analyst for ABC News. "It is the journalist's responsibility to make sure not to disclose anything before the polls close."
But, he added, "These were all extraordinary circumstances, and under extraordinary situations people make mistakes." Toobin, author of A Vast Conspiracy, is writing a book on the election; it is due out next year.
After the widespread embarrassment — and even investigations — over the missteps, the real question, Abrams said, is how they might change the 2004 election coverage.
"I think that next time the networks will exercise caution and spend more time calling the states," Brill said.