Network executives tell panel they plan changes

Executives from CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and The Associated Press testified along with the director of VNS

February 14, 2001
Web posted at: 5:43 p.m. EST (2243 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Network executives told a House committee Wednesday that they are making improvements in their election coverage to help avoid problems such as those that arose last November.

Among the changes are improving, but not necessarily abandoning use, of Voter News Service data.

"I continue to believe that properly corrected ... the VNS approach supported by our decision desk and our professional analysts remains the best and most accurate way of doing timely reporting of the election," said David Westin, president of ABC News.

VNS was formed by the networks and AP in 1993 to conduct exit polling. The results of those surveys were a key basis for coverage by the networks and the wire service that led to incorrect election night calls.

There was virtually unanimous support from the executives for a nationwide poll closing time.

ELECTION GUIDELINES Full-text of independent report on TV election night performance* and CNN statement regarding future election coverage * Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader     MESSAGE BOARD The Florida vote

Other changes to be made include putting in place stricter standards, including the use of multiple sources, before making projections of winners, and explaining more clearly to viewers that projections are not final results and how the projection process works.

Top news executives from CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and The Associated Press, plus the director of VNS, also spoke before the committee.

Billy Tauzin, R-Louisiana, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee before which the executives appeared, is offering legislation to make a uniform poll closing time across the country, 9 p.m. EST, and he said he would count on the networks voluntarily holding off projecting winners until after that time.

The executives said their networks will no longer make projections in a state before all voting in that state is completed.

Earlier, consultants who conducted investigations of television network coverage of November's election told the committee they found a seriously flawed system.

"Television news organizations staged a collective drag race ... recklessly endangering the electoral process, the political life of the country and their own credibility," said Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute, reading from the report he and two other experts prepared on CNN's election coverage.

They told the committee they recommended a series of steps to correct problems found in their study, including using exit polls for analysis rather than to project winners, waiting until a significant number of votes are actually counted and "taking more time to get it right."

Wattenberg also said federal grants given to states to improve their voting procedures should require that they no longer release vote counts until all polls are closed nationwide. "It seems to me this offers a simpler form of getting at this problem," he said.

Joan Konner of the Columbia University School of Journalism, also a member of the independent CNN review, said the panel found that the networks' reliance on the same source, the Voter News Service, for data led to much of the problems.

CNN News Group Chairman and CEO Tom Johnson

"We believe that relying on a single source of information contradicts well-known, deeply entrenched, best journalistic practices," she said.

Paul Biemer of the Research Triangle Institute, which did a study of VNS' procedures, said it found "opportunities for important errors" to enter the system.

A key problem area, he said, is in the "decision screens" sent to the networks. "The measures of uncertainty reported on the decision screens sometimes do not reflect potentially important sources of error in the VNS system," Biemer said.

Under questioning, he said networks that relied solely on the VNS information would have been misled.

On election night, the news organizations used VNS data to first call the state of Florida for Democrat Al Gore, only to later retract that prediction and much later give Florida to Republican George W. Bush, a call that also had to be retracted.

The initial call for Gore was made before polls had closed in the state's Panhandle, which is in the Central Time zone.

Tauzin has said his investigators have not found any "intentionally misleading or biased reporting" on the part of the networks but said networks need new procedures to prevent a similar situation from happening again.

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November 16, 2000

House Energy and Commerce Committee

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