Most of the media deserves a slap.
Drudge and NRO ran with those numbers. The MSM Knew of them and refused to hand Bush his states partly on the basis results conflicted. They are all to blame, just as those that believed them so readily are to blame.
The real question is whether tampering was done with the numbers, and who did it.
Michael Barone thinks the Rats got a hold of the locations of the exit pollers and sent it shills to "slam" the poll to suppress Rep turn out. I think he may be right. Otherwise, the pollers were biased and skewed the sample intentionally. Either way it was obvious the data was garbage. I did a quick sanity check and immediately knew the data was NFG. I am no genius. I am an engineer and a basic tenant of anyone who deals with data is to perform a "sanity check" of the results. If they are way outside expectations you stop and find out way. If you can't find a reason, you question the source of the data. Short of pictures of Bush with a boy or farm animal on the front page of the NYT, nothing explained the results they had.