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Henrie's Recipes
Egg all over their face again?
Posted Wed, 03 Nov 2004
It wasn't supposed to happen again.
But four years after their 2000 debacle, US media were left wondering on Wednesday if they had goofed one more time in trying to predict the results of a nail-biting presidential election.
Both Fox and NBC reported that Republican President George W. Bush would win the state of Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes bringing the incumbent to the doorstep of re-election victory over Democratic challenger John Kerry.
The Kerry campaign quickly fired back that all votes would have to be counted and refused to concede, raising the spectre of another legal battle — and more potential embarrassment for the US broadcast giants.
The 2000 election made history for many reasons, not least because the US networks made an early projection that Al Gore would win Florida, a state he ultimately lost in a bitter fight that went to the Supreme Court.
At the time, NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw admitted: "I not only have egg on my face, I have an entire omelette all over my suit."
Brokaw was back in the spotlight as the 2004 election dragged into the wee hours on Wednesday, after his network said Bush was expected to carry Ohio, a hotly contested battleground state.
"We did it after the polls were closed," the veteran newsman said, sounding unmistakably defensive about the prediction after the Kerry camp raised the alarm.
However, on rival CNN — which along with ABC and CBS did not call a winner in Ohio — commentators were in no mood to gloat as they revealed Republicans had been angered over media election coverage earlier in the day.
In what was supposed to be a critical reform, the major TV networks scrapped the vote data service used in 2000 to make the errant call for Gore and instituted a cautious, new system intended to prevent any mistakes.
But despite their best intentions, exit poll data found its way onto the internet well before any of the polls had closed on Tuesday — and it showed Kerry heading toward a comfortable victory.
"Not that anybody actually talked about them but everybody had it in their mind," said CNN election analyst Jeff Greenfield.
"People don't say what the exit polls are but there are implications," he said. "I think there's going to be a lot of hell to pay, after all this alleged reform, that these numbers were wrong."
He added: "The entire political community, until about six or seven o'clock tonight, was convinced based on these numbers that John Kerry was going to win."
All the major networks engaged in some modest boasting on Tuesday, insisting they had taken the necessary steps to prevent a repeat of the 2000 fiasco, which left their stars red-faced and their journalistic reputations in tatters.
"We're being very conservative here," CBS anchor Dan Rather said as the night's coverage got under way. He said his network would be "very confident" in predicting any results or say: "We don't know."
CBS made good on its promise as far as Ohio was concerned, but that raised the question if it had violated a cardinal rule of the competitive media business: Don't let your rivals beat you to a big story.
"We make our own decisions. We'd rather be last than be wrong," Rather insisted.
There was at least one bright spot for the media on every side, though — the lack of a clear winner meant viewers will keep tuning in for the foreseeable future.
AFP
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