WASHINGTON — When a congressional committee grills the heads of the five largest television networks Wednesday about their error-plagued coverage of presidential election results, this much will not be in dispute: The networks screwed up.
Just about everything else about election night will be in dispute.
Although committee Republicans have billed their inquiry as bipartisan, emotions still run deep along party lines.
Whose candidate did the premature calls of victory in Florida--first for Democrat Al Gore and later for Republican George W. Bush--damage more?
Republicans argue that the networks' early call for Gore reflected a built-in statistical bias in the exit polls shared by the networks to project the winner. And making that call 10 minutes before polls closed in the Florida Panhandle, they maintain, discouraged Republicans from voting there and in other states where the polls were still open.
Democrats will focus on the networks' later, but still premature, decision to give the state to Bush. That put Gore on the brink of publicly conceding the election--he already had made a concession call to Bush--and contributed to a widespread perception that the subsequent recount was an effort to snatch the election from Bush.
More generally, Democrats have expressed dismay that the first and so far only congressional hearing into the controversial election is not on voting but on television coverage.
"I think it is absolutely weird that the first thing that the U.S. Congress is looking at regarding the closest election in any person's memory is not the fact that they didn't count votes," said Rep. Peter Deutsch, a Democrat from Pembroke Pines, Fla.
The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.), called the hearing during the Florida recount to look for media bias. Last week, he softened his language, saying he believed that statistical rather than political bias favored Democrats.
The hearings' stated purpose is narrow: to ask top news officials and the director of Voter News Service, the organization that provided exit polling data and election projections to the networks, what went wrong.
Internal reports issued in the months since the election detail how the networks declared--and then retracted--victory in Florida for Gore and then Bush. The networks' consensus: They should not have called the election in Florida for Gore, nor should they have called the race in Florida for Bush early the next morning when a check of other news reports and the Florida secretary of state's Web site would have shown a race so tight that an automatic recount was likely.
