STANFORD, Calif. (AP) - The presidents of the three major television network news divisions were concerned about early election day exit polls that wrongly indicated Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was leading President Bush in several key battleground states.
But they also said the problem had been compounded when the exit polls, which were sponsored by a consortium of major news organizations including the Associated Press, were leaked onto the Internet. That, the presidents said Monday night, resulted in a widely publicized but ultimately incorrect expectation of how the election would ultimately turn out.
Shapiro and the other news presidents - David Westin of ABC News and Andrew Heyward of CBS News - met in a public forum to discuss and take questions about network coverage of the election, as well as the challenges posed by the rise of Fox News Channel, the proliferation of news across multiple media "platforms," and a public increasingly unwilling to plan around a fixed-time network newscast.
"There is an explosion in the number of news and quasi-news outlets and it goes into the Internet, it goes into broadband, streaming video, it's now on cell phones ... and those of us in network news have to recognize that," Westin said. "Technology is making it possible that the audience wants us to come to them, instead of making them coming to us which is traditionally what network news has done."
All three network news chiefs defended their decision to run just an hour of both parties' national conventions live each night, saying the conventions generated little if any real news.
And they said they believed network coverage of election returns Nov. 2 had been responsible, well paced, and relatively problem-free, compared to the erroneous calls made in 2000, which helped complicate that year's disputed presidential election outcome.
All three said their networks had set up investigative units to review any claims of voter fraud or problems with electronic voting technology this year, but that nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome.
"A lot of the allegations we've looked into, they're just not true," Shapiro said. "Believe me, I'd love a juicy story about the election as much as anybody. Florida was a great story, but it's just not there this time."
On Iraq, the three said that, in retrospect, they should have more aggressively questioned the Bush administration's grounds for invading Iraq in the spring of 2003.
"Simply stated, we let down the American people on weapons of mass destruction, and I sincerely regret that," Westin said. (darn that liberal media)
And while the networks continue to commit enormous resources to reporting from the war zone, the presidents said conditions in the country have made it too difficult to do much groundbreaking reporting now.
The three said that while they hoped to resist a push into opinionated, "edgy" news that has been the hallmark of Fox News and other cable outlets, they realized that Fox's success reminded them that networks needed to adapt to the new media marketplace in several ways.
"I think it's important to look at this as in increasingly sumptuous smorgasbord of choices, and Fox started that." Heyward said. "It's very different from the comfortable oligopoly that prevailed at the beginning of broadcast news, where you had networks with enormous market share. I think that's to the public benefit. It puts more pressure on us to be excellent."
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