US broadcast network to share its prel projection with viewers

New York, Nov 4 (PTI) A broadcast network and a website have said that they could foresee signalling to viewers early Wednesday morning which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.

Senior vice president of C.B.S. News Paul Friedman was
quoted by the New York Times as saying that the prospects for
Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of
electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. (0630 I.S.T.
tomorrow) — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island
close, let alone those in Texas and California.

At such a moment, determined from a combination of
polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could
share its preliminary projection with viewers, Friedman said.

"We could know Virginia at 7," he said. "We could know
Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know
Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the
election with those results. We can't be in this position of
hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious."

Similarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David
Plotz, said in an e-mail message to the paper that "if Obama
is winning heavily," he could see calling the race "sometime
between 8 and 9."

"Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn't engage in
a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California
and thus the presidency," Plotz wrote. "We will call it when a
sensible person — not a T.V. news anchor who has to engage in
a silly pretence about West Coast voters — would call it."

The paper said all the networks were engaging in similar
debates about striking the following balance: not relying too
much on early exit poll data — which had suggested, at least
early on Election Day in 2004, that Senator John Kerry might
be on track to defeat President Bush.

The decision desk director of A.B.C. News, Dan Merkle,
was quoted by the Times as saying: "I think at A.B.C. we're
going to be more cautious than that, in terms of telegraphing
which way the election is going."

Merkle said he was particularly concerned about how much
stock to put in exit polls "which are sometimes fine, and
which sometimes have had overstatements on Democratic
candidates in particular."

"We may have some indications from that data," Merkle
said. "That's different than going on the air to report that."

In something of a compromise, CNN said it might tell its
viewers that another news organisation had called a particular
state, but that it was holding off, and for what reason.

The consortium of six news organisations gathering the
exit poll data — NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and The Associated
Press — have agreed to keep the information under quarantine
until 5 p.m. (0330 I.S.T. Wednesday). PTI DS