How algore almost stole an election .....
Bug-eyed Chad Search
Posted on 10/16/2004 11:15:26 AM PDT by forest
Anyone still remember the mess all the news outlets made of reporting election results in 2000? Many of us still wonder if that wasn't a contrived deal to help Gore. Newscasters actually were calling the winner in states (like Florida) while citizens were still voting.
The problem started with a company named Voter News Service. VNS was owned by the Associated Press and the television networks. It was a profit making organization, a business. The rabidly left AP ran a large part of VNS, so there's little surprise about how they reported things.
Generally, through polls and exit polls, VNS built profiles on various precincts throughout a state so as to try to accurately predict the outcome of an election by the afternoon of election day. That information was then shared with network television producers so they could script their talking heads to report the election results.
On election night 2000, many Americans noticed that quite often the vote results displayed at the bottom of their television screens was greatly different than what the talking heads were announcing. Many times, Gore was projected the winner of a state when, in fact, the actual vote count displayed at the bottom of the screen showed Bush with a decisive lead. In fact, the VNS "decision desk" actually gave California to Gore as soon as the California polls closed and while the vote count was still zero. All networks, being programmed from the same consortium, immediately announced California for Gore within seconds of each other.
Generally speaking, the media does not project a state's results until the polls in that state have all closed. However, in 2000, they were in a hurry to cause a win for Gore. So, VNS -- and hence, all network news programs -- announced Florida as a win for Gore even before the Florida Panhandle polls were closed. The Panhandle is on Central time, you see, so the polls stayed open an hour later.
There is good data to support the fact that the early call for Florida and the so called "battleground states" helped suppress the conservative turnout in the West. That, of course, helped Gore quite a bit.
Later, the networks were forced to take back the Florida call for Gore. Much later, at 2:16 a.m., Fox News Channel declared Bush the winner in Florida. Within four minutes, NBC, CBS, CNN and ABC did exactly the same. That's when they all declared Bush the next President of the United States. All votes in all states were not yet counted. But, that wasn't important to the TV newsreaders.
Then, after 4 a.m., it became clear that the close Florida count was going south for Bush and would be contested. So, they had to take Florida away from Bush. Again, this happened at the same time on all networks.
By Wednesday, television networks tried to explain how they totally screwed up the call on the Florida election results -- twice. But, they couldn't really say much without digging themselves too deep in lies and deceptions, and/or letting America know that they are but talking puppets in the scheme of things. "We don't just have egg on our face," NBC's Tom Brokaw said. "We have an omelet."
Those of us on the Internet had raw data rather than VNS projections. Any network could have used the same data. ABC news ran a web site that updated the voter data in each state by the minute. But, they did not use their own site for broadcast reporting. Rather, they were programmed by the same VNS "projections" all other news programs used. The liberal AP was telling them what to say.
Many newspapers were not much better. Newspaper writers across the country wrote reports based on what they heard on TV and from the AP wires. So, after 4 a.m., there were reports of editors across the country shouting "stop the presses!"
The Voter News Service "decision desk" screwed up royally. According to some, VNS totally misanalyzed the Florida vote and embarrassed the network news shows.
Maybe.
Those VNS "mistakes" certainly benefited Gore at the polls. A lot, too.
Another interesting point: Those professional newsreaders, who were instructed to deride Dubya for occasionally mispronouncing a word or two on the campaign trail, themselves developed a bit of a diction problem. After 8 or 10 hours, the anchors and pundits were all babbling and butchering words regularly. Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Cokie Roberts, Chris Matthews, all of them were articulating poorly. Now they know how candidates feel at the end of a long day on the campaign trail.
Yet another interesting point that should be related is these newsreaders expressed disdain for the Internet reporting of Matt Drudge. All networks (and many newspapers) made many, many more errors in one twelve hour period than Drudge had in a few years.
Fast forward to 2004 and network executives are vowing to do better on Nov. 2. "No one wants a repeat of what happened, when we became part of the story of election night," said NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley.
"We all learned a lesson four years ago," said Fox News Senior Vice President John Moody. "There will probably be an abundance of caution in most newsrooms, at least in ours."
Voter News Service was abolished in January of last year after they totally screwed up the results again in the 2002 election. Does that mean the problem is corrected for this November? Nope! They're at it yet again.
According to Lawrence K. Grossman, who is a former president of NBC News and PBS, there is a new group taking the place of VNS this year.[1] As Grossman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:
"To save money, the networks will once again join forces to tally votes for the primaries, caucuses, and elections. This time, they've contracted with two firms, headed by the former CBS News election polling veterans Warren Mitofsky[2] and Joseph Lenski[3], to work together to conduct exit polls and supply data from a single set of sample precincts for all the networks' projections. The AP will collect the actual nationwide vote totals."
So there you have it. Election results will be compiled and reported by former CBS political reporters and reported by the rabidly left AP.
They might just as well have let the Kerry campaign do it.
1. <http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/2/voices-grossman.asp>
2. <http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm>
3. <http://www.edisonresearch.com/>
Or the reaffirmation, sadly.
No, we don't wonder -- we KNOW it was.
What is important now is that the scandal is not repeated this year. But how to stop it?
That's what I want to know. Surely the powers that be have thought of a way to get past the dim's dirty tricks.
How algore almost stole an election .....
Bug-eyed Chad Search
That Gore ballet box is choice. Good post.
Thanks. :^D
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