The Election 2000 Media Circus

Around 7:30 PM EST on Tuesday evening, the national media, including all three major networks and CNN, had declared that Vice President Al Gore had managed to win the state of Florida, one of the major battleground states of the election. This would prove to be the first of several miscues by the media over the course of an evening and early morning that will go down as one of the most interesting in U.S. history. Although several of the networks showed Bush leading the actual vote count throughout the evening in Florida, the networks had already "projected" Al Gore as the winner, based on the results of exit polls and a now-questioned formula for calculating the actual votes. Around 10:00 PM EST, all the major networks retracted their projections for Florida and began to back off other hasty projections for other states.

Although most Americans would have assumed that the networks had learned their lesson, the media pushed forward throughout the night, posting projections after less than 75% of the voting precincts within a state had reported. This resulted in ongoing confusion in states such as Wisconsin, Oregon, and, once again, Florida. The networks went so far as to declare George W. Bush the winner at around 2:18 AM on Wednesday morning, only to once again retract their declaration when learning that the race in Florida was still too close to call.

As the nation awaits the emergence of its next leader, we are all left to wonder about the influence of the media, not only on this election, but on the information they feed us on a daily basis. How many media reports consist of "projections" as opposed to facts?