BAD CALLS (Nov. 8, 2000)

PBS ^

[Rutles4Ever]

TERENCE SMITH: By any measure, last night was a nightmare for the news media, especially for network television. To help us sort out what happened and why, we are joined by Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; and by Warren Mitofsky, president of Mitofsky International, who is one of the founders of election exit polling. Last night, he advised CNN and CBS on their projections and retractions. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. Warren Mitofsky, you have been doing this exit polling on election night for years. What went wrong last night?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, we made a beautiful mistake or a mistake that was a beaut, I should say. The first projection, the projection for Vice President Gore winning Florida, was a little before 8 o'clock. It was based on exit poll data, actual vote returns that were being released by voting officials and on county data that was being tabulated separately. And those three sources of data gave us projections, different projections that showed Vice President Gore carrying the state by a small but comfortable margin.

TERENCE SMITH: And were those bad numbers or was there poor judgment involved?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, we subsequently, after the projection was on the air, found bad numbers in one county, and we also had a sample that misrepresented the west coast of Florida. It over-represented the Democratic vote in the Tampa area.

TERENCE SMITH: Right. But then of course later you called it for Governor Bush.

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, the projection after two o'clock in the morning was really based on the vote counts, almost all the votes were counted. I believe there were over 90 percent of those votes counted, and at that time Governor Bush was leading by about 56,000. We looked to see where the votes were missing -- the ones that have yet to be counted -- and when we did that analysis, we thought, Governor Bush had a sure margin of at least 30-35,000 votes. It turned out that that was wrong too.

TERENCE SMITH: Right.

Mistake was a beaut

WARREN MITOFSKY: That's why I said the mistake was a beaut.

TERENCE SMITH: Given your experience, were you surprised when you were wrong?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, yes, I've done this for many years. I've made mistakes before, not very many. I've called the wrong winner five times, you know, in over 30 years, but to make two mistakes in the same state in the same night is beyond anything that I've experienced before.

TERENCE SMITH: Marvin Kalb, what do you think is the impact of this mistake on the audience, on credibility, on the networks?

MARVIN KALB: Mistakes have consequences. I have enormous good, warm feelings for Warren Mitofsky. He is one of the best in the business -- but mistakes having consequences that people who make those mistakes have to account for them in one way or another. For example --

TERENCE SMITH: The networks.

MARVIN KALB: The networks have to account for them. The people who work for the networks, who urge the networks to make certain statements to the public, it's not only the public that is dependent upon these calls; it's the political system itself. Governor Bush was dependent upon it. Vice President Gore was dependent upon it. Everybody is. So these calls, I say they have to be right... and most of the time they are. They are terrifically effective instruments. At the same time look ahead now and I question really what will happen to the credibility of this kind of a system in the long term. Look ahead to the year 2004. Let's say Florida is again in play. Let's say the race is again close. And let's say they come in with a call. Will you automatically believe it now as a citizen or will you question it? Will you remember what happened in the year 2000? I think the networks have a lot of self-examination to do because if they don't, there will be a lot of people outside of the networks, political officials, Governor Jeb Bush said it on the program just a couple of minutes ago that the political people will look at the networks and expect them to do something about it.

TERENCE SMITH: Was the mistakes of a proportion -- in your view -- that makes it worthwhile to review or revise the very use of exit polling on election night?

MARVIN KALB: I spent a lot of time today talking with network executives, and a number of them raised with me the idea that people on the outside are going to say to us, what about exit polling -- are we doing that right? What about these calls -- are we too hasty? So they are aware of it, but I'm afraid that there may be calls outside of networks, perhaps in the Congress, perhaps in the executive branch for there to be new sets of guidelines that we cannot any longer just trust the networks to do it.

Learning from mistakes

TERENCE SMITH: Warren Mitofsky, what do you think about that? Has it reached a point where you ought to review what you do and how you do it?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, we review what we do after every election. We learn from our mistakes. Fortunately, we've had very, very few mistakes. The process is extremely reliable. As I say, I've participated in over 3000 elections in a half a dozen different countries. Prior to last night I have had exactly five mistakes in all these years. No process is perfect, but this process is about as good as I think you can make it. And we'll make it even better learning from last night's mistakes.

TERENCE SMITH: What are the lessons from last night's mistakes?

WARREN MITOFSKY: Well, the lessons are not to be more careful. We were as careful as we could be. And we were wrong. We can institute certain statistical procedures to help us with our quality control and our verification of numbers before we believe them and use them. And that part of the process deserves looking into and will probably get refined as a result of what happened last night.

TERENCE SMITH: You were talking about some possible oversight or review of all this by Congress or other -- what do you have in mind?

MARVIN KALB: What I have is mind is that a number of the people I talked to today raise an interesting question. We are, they say, totally dependent upon the networks for this information. If it seems, as Warren has outlined tonight, that you even with the best, they can't get it right and can make two mistakes in one night, maybe they should not be trusted to do it anymore. They may not be -- there could be an actual skepticism developing. So then to whom do you turn? And it could be that people will say maybe there ought to be a commission set up to look this. You cannot trust the networks to do it right anymore and the networks themselves are not the networks that Warren remembers from the old days at CBS. The networks today are different instruments. They are under phenomenal competitive pressures. They make decisions today, news decisions based on ratings, on money, on a determination to succeed, sometimes, sometimes even without regard to the quest for facts and accuracy.

TERENCE SMITH: Did you -- Warren Mitofsky -- did you feel under any competitive pressure last night to make projections before you were ready?

WARREN MITOFSKY: I didn't feel under any more pressure to make a projection last night than I've ever felt in all the years I've been doing this. I've been making projections with the same care for all of these years. Sure, people would like to see projections made quickly, but in my first election and almost every election since then, executives at news organizations, when push comes to shove, have gotten almost down on their knee, not literally, and said I don't care how long it takes, I want to be right. I heard it in my first election from Bill Leonard, who we all worked for, and I heard it as recently as this election from the executives at CNN and CBS.

TERENCE SMITH: All right. Final thought, Marvin Kalb, what do the networks need to do, do you think, to rebuild this confidence that you are talking about?

MARVIN KALB: I'm not sure, frankly, that the networks can rebuild the confidence that they once had. The public confidence is based on performance, and what happened last night was pretty horrendous -- a whole night of questionable commentary flowed from that decision on Florida. So a lot of people were being misinformed. And this is a very large mistake. And I think consequences will flow.

TERENCE SMITH: Warren Mitofsky, thanks so much for joining us. Marvin Kalb, thank you both.

[Rutles4Ever]

In case everyone forgot... the exit poll debacle in Florida in 2000....

[chemical_boy]

I think it would be a good idea to ignore the exit polling...

[Plutarch]

If exit polls were genuine results, we'd be sweating President Gore's re-election battle right now.