Ever since Election Night, when the news networks goofed "big time," as Dick Cheney might say, they have been engaged in an agonizing process of self-criticism, doubt and recrimination. How could we have blown such a story?
The anchors have apologized. "This has taken a chunk out of our credibility," said CBS's Dan Rather. "We made big mistakes." NBC's Tom Brokaw attempted humor — that's not "an egg" on our faces; that's "an omelet." Time magazine's editor, Walter Isaacson, watched the coverage and concluded they "have lost their baritone of authority."
In every newsroom, morale has been shaken and investigations have begun. In Congress, there have already been GOP calls for hearings, likely to start in early January. One question is whether the networks were "biased" in their coverage, tilting against Texas Gov. George W. Bush. The answer: no.
A more relevant question is whether the networks can any longer be trusted by Republicans or Democrats to call a close election. Imagine for a moment that Florida is again the scene of a close, bitter struggle in the 2004 presidential election, and the networks again "project" a winner. Who will believe them? And if the networks are not to be believed, then who or what will replace them and assume the awesome responsibility of calling an election?
The networks are now functioning in a twilight zone of economic and corporate uncertainty. Even though their ratings have recently skyrocketed in the Florida electoral crisis, just as they did during the Monica Lewinsky, Princess Diana and O. J. Simpson stories, the likelihood is that ratings will again dip after Bush or Al Gore is anointed as president-elect and politics returns to its familiar format of trench warfare within the Beltway.
In this environment, no challenge is more formidable for the electronic media than budgetary constraints, imposed by corporate management, which, with each year, have reduced the standards of journalistic performance.
Network news, once regarded as a public service, has become a business — a small corner of a corporate giant dedicated to the maximization of ratings and profit. CBS News, which was once called "the Tiffany network," has been absorbed by Viacom. (CBS is no longer even listed on the New York Stock Exchange.)
ABC News has been purchased by Disney, and NBC News by General Electric. CNN, the most successful of the cable news networks, will soon become just another asset on the books of America Online. News, like Mickey Mouse or lightbulbs, is treated as disposable tissue if it doesn't turn a profit.
Enter Election Night 2000, a disaster waiting to happen in full view of the nation and the world. After the 1988 election, the networks, under financial pressure from corporate bigwigs to slash "unnecessary" expenses, decided to cut their own polling operations.
According to this shortsighted calculation, each network would save $5 million to $10 million per election cycle. But to cover and call an election, each network still needed polling data. So what to do? In 1990 the networks, joined by the Associated Press, decided to pool their resources and establish the Voter News Service (VNS), which would be responsible for providing research, interview and other polling data to its sponsors.
The VNS system worked satisfactorily in 1992 and 1996. But just as the corporations cut network budgets, the networks then cut VNS' budget. Insiders worried about quality loss, but they were ignored. The bookkeepers worried only about profit loss — substance and reliability were not on their radar screens.
The advantage was that the networks saved money. The disadvantage was that the polling data for all of the networks now came from only one source. If that one source was faulty, then, like a virus, the faulty data would spread from VNS through the networks to the public. Which is exactly what happened on Election Night, contributing to a political crisis unparalleled in American history.
The corporate pressure on networks to turn a healthy profit has produced more than rushed calls on Election Night. It has also lowered journalistic standards and taste
The networks' current internal investigations may yet yield a more responsible and substantive approach to news, but only a handful of network optimists think so.
Marvin Kalb, a former network correspondent, is executive director of the Washington office of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.