FYI : O'Reilly said FOX was 1st to realease the data Gore won.
Ask him why he said that, not me.
Those are the facts as reported by him!
O'Reilly never said that FOX News was the first to call Florida for Gore in the 2000 election. Find a transcript of any of his shows after the November 7/8 election night and you won't find him making that claim. By the way, you do not release VNS 'data' that Gore has 'won', you make a 'CALL' that Gore has one based on the final decision made by the network 'decision desk'. The decision desk uses the VNS data, and other data they have available to make a call. In the Florida 2000 election each of the associated networks (NBC/MSNBC, CBS/CNN, FOX, ABC, AP, VNS) made their mistakes independently of one another based on calls by the above six listed decision desks, even though they shared common VNS data. The reason that they made calls for Gore at different times was due to their 'feel' for how the VNS data matched up with hard AP data, early hard precienct numbers, and other non-common data sources available each network.
What you will find is that O'Reilly said that FOX News was the first to call Florida for Bush at 2:16:00am that morning. You will find your memory is not the final authority as to what occured that night. The written and video record is far superior. By the way, when you report 'facts' without a source, then they are assumed to be yours. If you wish to cite Bill O'Reilly, then hone in on the broadcast date in question, don't attribute your 'facts' to him in a subsequent post. O'Reilly never said what you attribute to him.
Again, it was NBC/MSNBC that first 'pulled the trigger' for Gore in Florida at 7:49:40pm, followed by CBS/CNN at 7:50:11pm, next VNS (Voter News Service) at 7:52:00pm immediately followed by FOX at 7:52:01pm, the AP at 7:53:00pm, and finally ABC making the last call at 8:02:00pm. No source you can cite will contradict this data, ever.
Source: ON-AIR NETWORK AND VNS CALLS, PRESIDENTIAL RACE, NOV. 7/8, 2000
Source: At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election, by Bill Sammon. Regnery Publishing, Inc. Washington, D.C., 2001
Write to o'Reilly's staff at FOX News and see if you can get them to confirm your 'facts' that you attribute to him. I'll bet you find they can't because he didn't...
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