[First published in AM New York.]
SO HOW GOOD A JOB did the mass media do covering the election? The voters’ choice, at least as defined by those media, was clear – but it had the clarity of an LCD. Not liquid crystal lighting, I’m afraid – but the Lowest Communicable Denominator.
Voters, we’re told, opted for certainty and so-called “steadfastness” (with Bush, supposedly) over thoughtfulness and a readiness to embrace change (claimed by Kerry) – a choice clinched by a slim majority of 3%. Any more elevated or sophisticated examination of the alternatives went entirely missing from the airwaves and most newspaper pages, right down to the day of decision.
“Big Media” was using some crude tools as it reinforced that crude choice. And finally there’s little as crude as an exit-poll on D-Day itself.
All the news networks were being fed exit-poll details from the same crowded boiler-room above a former Woolworth‘s store in Somerville, N.J. It was in such unlikely surroundings that the pollster partnership Edison-Mitofsky‘s had set up its nerve-center.
The team had been hired by a consortium of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press, with big city newspapers like The New York Times signing on as subscribers, in order to avoid a repeat of 2000’s Florida fiasco. The partnership’s influence was huge, and misleading.
Midway through Eastern voting hours, a John Kerry victory was thought absolutely certain by New York Times executives and even – if less happily – at Fox News and the New York Post. All the TV networks, though they agreed to publicly announce nothing until polls had closed, labored under the same misapprehension.
The unavoidable truth is – as was beaten into me by the veteran pollster Bob Worcester of Market Opinion Research International when I first used his services for my TV election programs – that “exit-polls give only a snapshot, frozen in time”. They cannot be used as predictors of a trend — and should certainly never be used alone, without full consideration of other variables like absentee and early voters. They can misrepresent the significance of particular slices of the electorate, as is suspected in parts of Florida, where interviews may have overemphasized single women’s (largely pro-Kerry) views.
As for the pollsters themselves, Edison-Mitofsky say on their own website: “Changes were made to see that mistakes like the ones in 2000 would be very unlikely to occur again.” Maybe not enough changes.
There are of course legions of disappointed people this week besides John Kerry. Consider the man who invented exit-polling back in 1967, for CBS News. He went on to found the first pooled network polling company VNS – which the networks dropped after Florida 2000.
His name? Warren Mitofsky.
Sounds familiar?
He’s now partner in the new company Edison-Mitofsky, and was presiding genius, once again, over this year’s exit-polling. I can’t help but recall Oscar Wilde‘s slick and sick joke at an orphan’s expense: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.”
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IN THE PARALLEL universe of the blogosphere, the exit-poll debacle enabled Matt Drudge to practice his own idiosyncratic form of disinformation – at least long enough to over-stimulate the Kerry campaign’s hopes and those of its mainstream journalistic well-wishers.
Drudge thumbed his nose, like Slate.com did, at the self-denying ordinance of the networks and fed out all the exit-poll evidence of a Kerry triumph – for a while.
Then the stock market took a tumble and it was perhaps too serious for Drudge to handle. The “real” people’s choice, not the exit-polls, suddenly became his touchstone.
We can only wonder who phoned to tell him to lay off.
