Opinion: CBS mum on calling Indiana for Clinton so early -- and correctly
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The good thing about an exclusive political news story is that you’re the only with it.
The bad thing about an exclusive political news story is that you’re the only one with it. And that can sometimes be because you’re dead wrong. Remember the botched state election calls in the 2000 presidential election?
The amount of Mylanta going down over at CBS News must have really gone up Tuesday evening after the initial euphoria of being the first network to call Indiana a win for Sen. Hillary Clinton. And the only one. And the only one. And the only one.
For five full hours. All alone out there in political TV land.
So why exactly did CBS News feel comfortable doing that so far in front of the rest of the media?
The network wouldn’t provide details today about what went down at its decision desk last night, except to say it felt confident in its call at 8:09 p.m. Eastern time. That’s when CBS anchor Katie Couric broke into the “NCIS” sleuth show to report the network was projecting that Clinton would win Indiana and....
...Sen. Barack Obama would win North Carolina.
“This feels like Groundhog’s Day, doesn’t it?” Couric said to senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield of the split decision.
Other news organizations did not follow suit, however. For the next several hours, the cable news channels dissected the situation in Lake County, Ind., one of the most populous parts of the state, which did not report any results until close to midnight.
And those numbers appeared to trim the New Yorker’s victory margin to a few thousand.
It wasn’t until after 1 a.m. ET that the Associated Press and the rest of the media unofficially handed Clinton a narrow victory in the state of slightly more than 1%.
“When we made the projection,’ Kathy Frankovic, the network’s director of surveys, said in a statement today, ‘we remained confident Senator Clinton would carry Indiana based on the information we had gathered about vote projections and the demographic composition of the vote that was yet to be counted.”
A CBS News spokeswoman said the network had access to some vote count information before the Associated Press in some key locations.
It’s unclear what that information was. The networks and the AP all receive the same exit poll data from Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International as members of the National Election Pool, which was set up after the 2000 problems.
-- Matea Gold