INDEPTH: US ELECTION
Covering the coverage:
How the networks did
by Dan Brown, CBC News Online | November 3, 2004
Just as the presidential campaign of 2004 was dominated by a single issue (the war on terrorism), the election-night television coverage was also about one thing: election night 2000.
As viewers flipped from network to network, they saw nothing but the influence of the blown call in Florida from four years ago.
Vote entry clerks at an Associated Press vote tabulation centre Tuesday evening. News organizations, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox, relied on AP as their sole source for U.S. vote count results. (AP Photo/Diane Bondareff)
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Back then, the competition among the anchors was to be the first to declare a winner. "Now they're competing to see who can be the most cautious," Margaret Engel – the managing editor of the Newseum, the interactive museum of journalism in Arlington, Va. – said midway through Tuesday night.
Engel wasn't the only observer who noticed that Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Wolf Blitzer and company didn't want to preside over a repeat of 2000, when the broadcast media couldn't decide if Al Gore or George W. Bush had taken the White House.
"I think they are maybe overdoing the caution a little bit," echoed Lisa Schmeiser, a writer in Los Angeles whose work appears on websites like TeeVee and Television Without Pity.
According to Schmeiser, the emphasis on circumspection was a protective move on the part of the networks. Simply put, they wanted to avoid being the scapegoats in the event of a contested result, as happened with Gore's near miss.
This is why the phrase that was uttered the most on Tuesday's broadcasts was "It's too close to call."
"There are more disclaimers on every piece of news-it is like reading an ad for cigarette smoking or birth control at this point," Schmeiser said later Tuesday evening.
What this wary approach meant was that the talking heads employed by the networks were skittish about making premature commitments. This led to a few somewhat comical moments.
Early in the evening, just before a commercial break, CNN's Blitzer told viewers to stay tuned. "We may have some projections; we may not!" he blustered. After midnight, Blitzer was telling those who were still awake that the night was still young.
"They haven't jumped to the end game quite so quickly this time," said Tom Patterson, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government who studies election-night broadcasts.
In Patterson's view, the evening's slow pace was proof that the networks had made good on their pledge to do a better job by instituting new journalistic procedures.
Priscilla Martin, left, points out results to her husband, Art Martin,
at Republican headquarters election night in Portland, Ore., Tuesday,
Nov. 2, 2004. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)
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"They've held to their promise of using a stricter standard before making the call," he said as the results rolled in. "I think it's had the effect of improving the rest of their coverage as well because it's actually given them more breathing space to do some analysis."
One element of the evening's newscasts that stood out for Patterson was how the networks did not immediately begin their coverage by jumping to exit-poll results. In fact, on the Fox News Channel, anchor Shepard Smith began a panel discussion on exit polls by disparaging them.
"I don't trust 'em. I've never trusted 'em. They failed us last time," he said in his Mississippi drawl. If there was a competition among journalists to see who could come across as the most skeptical, Smith won hands down.
And Smith wasn't above doing a bit of politicking himself. "No need to walk around some NASDAQ site, you can get it all here," he said shortly after coming on the air, a pointed reference at CNN's New York set, which consisted of a vast bank of TV screens.
Fox also distinguished itself in another way. On a night when the networks tried to outdo one another by presenting the results in as flashy a manner as possible, Fox was a standout by being, in Schmeiser's words, the "cheap and tacky graphics network."
She said the Fox display reminded her of the network's World Series broadcasts: "It's kind of hard to make baseball look like a backyard porn production, but they manage that too."
But if caution was what the U.S. media establishment learned from the experience of 2000, this year's lesson may be about the side effects of being too guarded.
"They're very cautious to the point of not being helpful," said Engel, who believes that the big story that may emerge from this year's coverage is that Americans were forced to seek out information on the internet because they couldn't get it on TV.
Schmeiser concurred, saying that the advantage of the internet is that it offers commentary on very specific topics that isn't available through network coverage. People who wanted information about the gay-marriage bans that were passed Tuesday in various states, for instance, could find that kind of focused commentary on the web.
"It may be when [the networks] do their post-election analysis and look back at their procedures, possibly they might conclude they were a little too cautious this time and thus withheld information they could have relayed to the American public," added Patterson.
In other words, it wasn't exactly the most compelling election night.
"To be honest, it's kind of boring," Schmeiser said.
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