Bloggers Botch Election Call

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In the race to be first to report the winner of this year’s election, the blogs called the election before any polling sites closed – and botched it. Meanwhile the television networks, in an attempt to avoid a rerun of the 2000 Gore wins embarrassment, bided their time, talking for hours into the evening about anything but the winner.


By 3 p.m. yesterday, Internet pundits had made their faulty call: Kerry in a landslide.


Every time the political gossip blog Wonkette.com posted new exit-poll figures, the numbers seemed to show a new lead for Senator Kerry. By 5 p.m., Wonkette was calling Iowa for Mr. Kerry, a mild upset. By 6 p.m., the site had Mr. Kerry with more than 300 electoral votes, a virtual landslide.


Across New York and the country, hundreds of thousands of blog readers tracked the election from their computer terminals, at work or at school or at home. While the networks were still showing soap operas, everyone in control of a Web site, from Slate’s Jack Shafer to Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, seemed to be publishing exit-poll figures – the attribution was generally absent, as was any indication of the purported methodology – reporting a victory for Mr. Kerry.


To the publisher of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, the traffic presaged a change in the way election results and exit polls are reported. Mr. Denton told The New York Sun he thinks this is the last national election in which the networks will try to withhold the results of exit polls.


Television news executives did not appear, however, to be trembling from the threat. That bloggers were releasing exit-poll data early “means nothing” for the networks, a spokeswoman for NBC News, Barbara Levin, wrote in an e-mail to the Sun. “We will exercise caution in any case.”


In an attempt to avoid a rerun of the 2000 election, however, all the networks not only created a new vote-projecting consortium, the National Election Pool, but they also made a variety of superficial changes. Pundits relied upon phrases such as “estimate” and “apparent winner” and peppered their reporting by declaring that a couple of minutes was always worth the wait to get the story right. NBC quarantined its experts who were making calls on winners and losers in a room without TV sets, so they couldn’t see their rivals. Fox had four executives on its decision desk and promised not to “call” a state unless all four agreed. CBS said it wouldn’t declare a winner or loser in any state, cautiously saying it would only “estimate” a winner.


“We’re being very conservative here,” the CBS anchor, Dan Rather, said on the air after most polling sites had closed last night. “If we feel a state will go in one direction or another we tell you that. If not we just simply say we don’t know.”‘


After repeatedly using the phrase “insufficient data” to describe the lack of polling data, Mr. Rather put a new spin on his mantra when revealing results for Missouri: “The Show Me State, show me ‘insufficient data.'”


With this likely to be the last presidential election that Mr. Rather will cover as anchor, and with NBC’s Tom Brokaw soon to retire, the anchors’ swan song was an exercise in restraint. Rather than making calls on the likely winner, the anchors spent the time discussing how many lawsuits the elections could trigger, when a final count would be decided, and what preparations they had made to prevent mistakes made in 2000.


That year the networks twice prematurely declared a winner in Florida – first awarding it to Vice President Gore and then reversing the call, declaring President Bush the winner. The networks rescinded that call and waited weeks to make a final call before Florida was officially placed in the Bush column.


By late last night, it appeared the blogs predicting a Kerry landslide were the ones to blow the call, in the rush to be first.


An ecstatic afternoon report from Wonkette said in part:



“4:41 p.m.: Bush only up by one in Virginia? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
“Kerry = + numbers
“FL +4
“OH +5.”


By night, Wonkette adopted a sheepish tone.


The leaks by the bloggers contravened the wishes of the networks, which keep their official polling data secret until states have closed their polls. Conventional wisdom suggests that if exit polls show one candidate winning, voters will decide to stay home.


Such a policy violates the whole ethos of blogging.


“Slate believes its readers should know as much about the unfolding election as the anchors and other journalists, so given the proviso that the early numbers are no more conclusive than the midpoint score of a baseball game, we’re publishing the exit-poll numbers as we receive them,” the Slate.com blogger and editor, Mr. Schafer, wrote.


Or as Ms. Cox wrote: “We post these numbers because information wants to be free! Run, information! Run for your life!”


Every time Ms. Cox posted a new set of numbers yesterday into the evening, her Web site slowed down dramatically. By 5 p.m., the site was only occasionally responsive.


The unprecedented traffic load caused computers run by a Web hosting company, Hosting Matters, to crash in the middle of the afternoon.


Even large, corporate-backed Web sites suffered from overload. When


In a late-night posting titled “Ohio is the New Black,” Ms. Cox seemed to be concerned that Wonkette might no longer be looked to as the cutting-edge source for information. At once apologetic and mischievous, she wrote: “About those exits: We’re starting to get this weird feeling that the birdies who gave us those delicious early numbers are really Karl Rove.”


The New York Sun

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