A night of caution, easy calls

Heading into Tuesday's countdown, the only thing the network and cable news anchors would promise was caution.

Lots and lots of caution.

The specter of the botched 2000 election coverage haunted the networks - first it was Vice President Al Gore, then George W. Bush, then too close to call. And finally, the lawyers.

Recalling 2000, national news focused increasingly on Florida and closely contested Ohio. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw wondered aloud if counting would be complete in Florida by daybreak and noted, "That's one more nightmare for the state of Florida."

With all the hedging before the polls closed Tuesday, viewers might have assumed networks would wait for actual vote counts.

They would have been wrong. Polls started closing at 7 p.m., and broadcasters jumped right in, calling four states simultaneously as coverage fired up. From there, they were off and running - cautiously - as states closed and the races that analysts saw as obvious went onto the tote boards. Still, analysts refused to guess at close contests.

Through the night, as polls closed on the hour or half hour, states fell into one of three baskets: Bush, Kerry or too close.

But before the numbers began trickling in, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, preparing for his last national election before retiring, tried to steel viewers for a long night.

"We've got a lot of computer experts looking at the data we are seeing," Brokaw said on MSNBC. "When we go on the air tonight, patience will be the watchword."

"We'd rather be last than be wrong," CBS News anchor Dan Rather told viewers.

"There will be no predictions from this anchor chair," promised ABC's Peter Jennings.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer stood in front of a giant countdown clock showing six minutes until polls closed in North Carolina, West Virginia and battleground Ohio.

"We may have some projections," Blitzer said. "We may not." Of course he had projections. When the clock struck zero, Blitzer announced West Virginia went for Bush. But Ohio, he said, was too close.

CNN went high tech for its election coverage, with Blitzer at the NASDAQ Marketsite in New York City, apparently so he could stroll in front of 96 floor-to-ceiling video screens creating what CNN called a "liquid wall" of vote counts.

Meanwhile, NBC renamed Rockefeller Center "Democracy Plaza" for its coverage.

At CBS, while John Roberts showed off a gleaming, touch-sensitive video screen that allowed him to drag a map of the United States around with his hand to focus on races, Rather used a low-tech pencil to point out states on a map in front of him.

Rather also adhered to his folksy chatter.

All candidates could do was "wait and sweat," he noted. Later, he remarked "Looky here. Hoo boy!" and found a race that was "hotter than the devil's anvil." Early local coverage stuck to hunts for potential election problems - largely reporting that polling went well in the Tampa Bay area - as mounting totals in local races scrolled across the bottom of the screen. The local stations did a workmanlike job of reporting area races in their 11 o'clock news shows.

In one exchange, Tampa Tribune columnist Daniel Ruth, interviewed on television partner WFLA-TV Ch. 8, was asked why voters approved so many constitutional amendments, some that appeared contradictory.

"It may show sometimes voters are stupid," he said.

Shortly before midnight, WFLA reporter Lance Williams said the station received a flood of viewer phone calls and said perhaps what Ruth meant was that voters needed to be better informed.

After television viewers were bombarded with more than 900,000 ads for the presidential race, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus and the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, newscasters couldn't deliver an early conclusion, left instead with a tight race they were reluctant to risk another early call on.

Instead, they pointed to "decision desks" and the National Elections Pool they created to replace the old Voter News Service. "Will we have a winner by the time you go to bed?" Fox's national anchor Shepard Smith asked. "Possibly."

World and national headlines

Election 2004

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