http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec00/badcall_11-8.html#
One would think that before the news reports something, they make sure they have their facts straight. However in the Presidential Election of 2000 between then Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee and then Governor George W Bush of Texas, that was not exactly the case. As early as 8:00 pm, the news networks of CNN and CBS, both advised by Warren Mitofsky, called the State of Florida for Vice President Gore (which would've given the Vice President the White House) based on exit polling in the state's counties. By 11 they retracted that as Governor Bush went into the lead in raw vote tallies. Towards 2 in the morning Bush was still in the lead in the vote tallies.
Warren Mitofsky asserted that he and his methods of projecting are pretty much perfect even though it just got everything completely incorrect and was providing wildly false information for hours which lead the nation into limbo for about a month, leaving us President-elect-less. But the system is still completely credible, no one should loose confidence, nothing needs to change and everything is still pretty much perfect. (Except for this time and 5 other times but other than that completely perfect)
However people on the other side like Marvin Kalb are much more skeptical. How can we trust this system when it was so incredibly wrong? Was this did to competition between news agencies everyone wanting I get this major projection out first? Or just because of sheer incompetence? There doesn't seem to be any other option, and both of them are extremely good reasons to loose credibility in the system. So what happened? Were changes made? Did we get better? Nothing like this seems to have happened since, so things must've improved, but what happens when a 2000-esque election comes along again? Will we again be President-elect-less for over a month? I hope not and that the news agencies are more careful about their projections. Or else I'll just have to go and count every vote myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment