Television's Performance on Election Night 2000 a Report for CNN
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Television's Performance on Election Night 2000 A Report for CNN By Joan Konner, James Risser, and Ben Wattenberg January 29, 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. THE CHARGE OF THE INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE II. PREAMBLE III. INTRODUCTION IV. SUMMARY FINDINGS V. RECOMMENDATIONS VI. THE REPORT VII. CONCLUSION VIII. ABOUT THE AUTHORS IX. APPENDICES 2 I. THE CHARGE OF THE INDEPENDENT COMMITTEE The three authors of this report were asked by CNN to constitute an independent committee to investigate the performance of CNN and to make findings and recommendations. Specifically, Tom Johnson, chairman and CEO of the CNN News Group, asked us to determine: What went wrong at CNN? Why did it happen? What should be done to guard against a recurrence in future elections? He gave us the freedom to question whomever we wished, to obtain any documents we wanted, to write a report that would be made public reaching whatever conclusions seemed warranted. At the root of Tom Johnson’s three questions we found two other broader ones that deserve consideration: What were the networks doing? Why were they doing it? II. PREAMBLE On Election Day 2000, television news organizations staged a collective drag race on the crowded highway of democracy, recklessly endangering the electoral process, the political life of the country, and their own credibility, all for reasons that may be conceptually flawed and commercially questionable. Their excessive speed, combined with an overconfidence in experts and a reliance on increasingly dubious polls, produced a powerful collision between the public interest and the private competitive interests of the television news operations and the corporations that own them. Their hyper-competition stemmed from a foolish attempt to beat their rivals to the finish line in calling state-by-state winners in the presidential election, foolish because few in the crowd knew then or know now which network got the checkered flag most often. Foolish because each network funded its competitor’s work. Foolish, too, because their haste led to two mistaken calls in the state that turned out to hold the key to the outcome of the election. All, in turn, played an important role in creating the ensuing climate of rancor and bitterness. Those calls and their retractions constituted a news disaster that damaged democracy and journalism. 1 III. INTRODUCTION The results of the United States presidential election of 2000, conducted on November 7, were not finally known until 36 days later, making this election one of the most drawn-out, confusing, acrimonious and controversial elections in the nation’s history. The confusion and controversy began on Election Night itself, when the television networks committed serious errors in their reporting of the election returns. Most serious were: The report that Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, had won the key state of Florida, followed later by a retraction of that report. The report that Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, had won Florida, and with it the presidency. This led to Gore’s personal concession by telephone to Bush, based on the erroneous information. Yet another retraction by the networks, this time on the Bush call. The erroneous Gore calls were made by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, as well as by the Associated Press. The later Bush calls were made by the five television networks but not by the AP. The uncertainty about who had won Florida, engendered by the closeness of the Florida contest, but exacerbated by the mis-reporting, turned out to play an unhealthy role in the subsequent tense and potentially dangerous post-election controversy until the final determination of the race after more than a month in a climate of public rancor. How much television news contributed to that climate is speculative, but surely it was an important factor. Our inquiry has included extensive face-to-face interviews with personnel from CNN, from AP, from Voter News Service — the consortium set up by the five networks and AP to tabulate election results through exit polling and other means and to convey results to the six clients — and from the joint CNN/CBS “decision team” that evaluated VNS information and advised those two networks when to “call” a state. In addition, we gathered extensive published information, both historical and current, concerning broadcast coverage of this election and previous ones. Tom Johnson told us in an interview that he regarded television’s handling of election night as “a fiasco,” that he took personal responsibility for what happened, and that he felt “a real sense of embarrassment and shame” at CNN’s performance. That said, it should be noted generally that CNN personnel, on-air and off-air, including Johnson, are honorable television news professionals and among the most responsible in the nation. At the same time, serious mistakes were made by CNN, as they were at other networks. Our findings and comments are detailed later in this report, but a summary of key findings and recommendations follows: 2 IV. SUMMARY FINDINGS CNN and other television networks, while acting within their legal and journalistic rights, failed their journalistic mission and reported the 2000 presidential election in a way that improperly interfered with the election process. In calling winners of individual states based on exit polling and votes from sample precincts, accuracy and completeness of information were sacrificed to the pressures of competition. The desire to be first, or at least not to be consistently behind the others, led the networks to unwisely make calls based on sketchy and sometimes mistaken information. With regard to some states with more than one time zone and different poll closing times, CNN and others did not always wait until all polls were closed in those states before calling a winner. One such state was Florida, where CNN projected Gore as the winner 10 minutes before polls closed in the state’s western panhandle, which contains 5 per cent of the population and where, as in most polling places, voters on line at poll closing time may still cast their ballots. Viewers were not told that those polls still were open. Viewers were told the Florida polls closed at 7 p.m., when in fact the polls in the panhandle closed an hour later at 7 p.m. Central Time. Whether, and how much, such calls affect intrastate voter turnout in the remaining minutes is not known, nor is the impact of calling a winner upon voter turnout and behavior in other states where polls have not closed. Allegedly conclusive studies usually refer to how small the impact may be. (See Appendix 2) But presidential elections are too sacred a part of our democratic system to take such a risk. And as Florida showed, a few votes can mean a great deal. CNN and its competitors in fact did not compete in the most vital area of all — the obtaining of data from exit polls, from sample precincts, and from counted returns. All used information provided by Voter News Service (VNS), an organization jointly owned and governed by five networks and the AP. CNN neglected to identify the source of the information, a serious breach in the journalistic commitment to disclose sources when possible. VNS performed its task inadequately, and the CNN/CBS decision team failed in important instances to consult other available sources of election returns. Our inquiry indicated serious flaws in the polling methods used by VNS, including exit polling, outdated polling models and outdated technology, in a circumstance of changing public attitudes and changing socio-economic patterns. The impact of early and absentee voting is not fully known or accounted for. Similar problems erode the validity of precinct models. There was a recognition well before the election that the VNS technology was not up-to-date, but the owning partners did not upgrade it. VNS also committed errors in vote tabulation in Florida. Exit polling is extremely valuable as a source of post-election information about the electorate. But it has lost much of the value it had for projecting election results in close elections. The number of people who decline to respond to exit polls, combined with the increase in the number of early and absentee voters who are not reached by exit polls, are making the results of such polls less reliable with each election cycle. In any case, exit polls, whether accurate or not, are self-generated news. Their use by television networks to project election results is an attempt to forecast what is not 3 yet known — the actual vote count — but which will be known within a few hours when the votes are counted. This, combined with the questionable reliability of the exit polls and statistical analysis of a few sample precincts, led to serious mistakes committed by the networks in an attempt to gain a few minutes of competitive advantage. The CNN/CBS decision team also performed badly. It did not adequately evaluate VNS information and did not make appropriate use of other information available through AP and through county voting operations and secretary of state websites. Consultation with these additional sources might have prevented at least the second call of Florida that had to be retracted. CNN made little effort to inform its viewers about the source of its election- returns information, nor tell them that virtually all the information was coming from one source jointly employed by it and its competitors. It was not made clear to viewers that winners were being called in various states based mainly on statistics, models, and exit polls, not on actual counted votes. CNN did not report to viewers until very late in the process that the closeness of the Florida vote would likely lead to a mandatory recount under Florida law.