By Munir K. Nasser
Chief Correspondent, Washington, DC
Albawaba.com
Americans are blaming their television networks for the confusion they created in the early hours on Wednesday when they declared wrong results for the presidential race twice.
Critics of the networks point to the whole shaky system of declaring winners based on exit polls even on incomplete returns. They believe the system collapsed in the most spectacular fashion, misleading the public about the closest White House race in a generation.
In just over six hours, the networks award Florida to Al Gore and then to George W. Bush only to greet viewers awakening next morning with the same maddening headline they had been seeing for weeks: "Too close to call."
At 2:17 Wednesday morning, Bush was declared the next president and even Gore was fooled into calling the Texas Governor to concede. But then the networks did their second mistake, Gore withdrew his concession, and the Florida ballots went for a recount with just over 1,700 votes separating the two potential presidents. The nation is still holding its breath awaiting to know who will be living in the White House for the next four years.
Several newspapers, including the New York Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, followed television's lead by declaring Bush the victor, some on their Web sites. The Washington Post Web site called Bush the winner for about 45 minutes before pulling back. "BUSH WINS!" declared the New York Post in a red-ink banner headline.
Just after 10 last Tuesday night, in the wake of calls from the Bush campaign, CBS, ABC and CNN followed by NBC 15 minutes later, backed off their earlier projection that Gore had won Florida.
And that dramatically changed the tone of the commentary, which had come close to burying Bush's candidacy.
The embarrassing flip-flop came 10 minutes after the airing of a videotape in which Bush took the extraordinary step of calling in the cameras to contest the network projections, not just in Florida but in Pennsylvania as well. The changing of the color-coded maps, with Florida going from blue to gray, was rather humiliating for the networks.
All the networks receive the same exit-poll data from Voter News Service but make their own decisions about projections. Critics of the networks believe they should not be involved in calling the results in a close race like this. They say the networks’ high-wire act led them to fall on their face in a spectacular display in front of millions of viewers.
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
