Fighting the Last War

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

For pundits and anchormen, a night of surprises

"Beware the analyst who draws the moral before the tale is told. "

--CBS Commentator Bill Moyers on election night, 1982

The script might have been called "Seven Anchormen in Search of an Author. " The network news veterans who conveyed the results of 494 mid-term races last week were sure that the nation had spoken in unison, sending a clear, concise message to the White House. But the newscasters clashed bafflingly all night about what the message was. From the three networks came an erratic and sometimes puzzling performance, more melodramatic than in past elections and less informative, though the networks now command much greater resources.

To an unusually animated Dan Rather of CBS, it was "gut-check time" and the sweet hour of prayer" for the Republicans. Even before the network formally estimated, at 9:06 p.m. E.S.T., that Democrats could gain 34 House seats (the actual total was 26), Rather summed up, "The message to the President might well be, 'Reverse course.' "

To John Chancellor of NBC, however, the patterns were "very similar to 1980: there is no rebellion that we can find." Added his colleague Tom Brokaw: "The country is not moving to the left sharply or to the right sharply." Concurred Roger Mudd: "If I were Ronald Reagan reading these returns, I would probably stay the course." As the evening wore on, NBC's tone altered somewhat, but it never approached CBS's relish for Republican ruin.

Over at ABC, meanwhile, Ted Koppel divined that President Reagan's economic policies were clearly the issue, and that if Democrats gained even 15 seats in the House, "Reaganomics is going to be in trouble." Frank Reynolds said repeatedly that "Democrats need only five victories to control the Senate," sounding as though he really anticipated that result. David Brinkley, playing the nightlong role of pinprick to his teammates' balloons, muttered his doubts that mild changes of complexion in Congress would much affect what measures were enacted.

To compound the confusion, the networks varied widely on when they were ready to predict a particular outcome. Indeed, NBC lurched into proclaiming the re-election of Republican Governor James Thompson of Illinois barely an hour after the polls closed; ABC and CBS prudently held off all night, and the race was not settled for Thompson until week's end. In at least one contest, all three networks were wrong: they labeled Representative John Hiler, an Indiana Republican, the loser of a seat he ended up keeping by 51% to 49%.

Most perplexing of all, the networks reached their divergent conclusions from parallel evidence: raw-vote totals, samples of key precincts and "exit polls" of people who had just voted. All three networks, moreover, found that voters were about evenly split on the President's overall merits, on the efficacy of his economic programs and on the relative importance of unemployment vs. inflation and Government spending. Where the networks parted company, and went awry, was in judging the meaning of those Polls, or perhaps in believing that any consistent meaning was to be found.

NBC, for example, ably challenged the notion that the vote was a referendum on Reaganomics. But its election coverage began, while polls were still open across much of the country, with a too cozy report from the White House on the positive signs that Republicans perceived. CBS erred the other way. The hyperkinetic Rather, who had stoked up on spaghetti for energy, seemed infatuated with homey metaphors ("as long as a well rope") and cutesy topical imagery ("E.T., phone home: [New Mexico Senator and Former Astronaut] Jack Schmitt needs help"). Above all, he appeared hell-bent on spotting a Democratic trend. For Republicans, he said, "it certainly doesn't look good. No way to make it look good." White House Correspondent Lesley Stahl shared his view. Soon after 7 p.m. E.S.T., she announced flatly, "It is a Democratic year." After Reporter Bruce Morton miscalled Hiler's defeat, he suggested that Democrats could win "40 or 50 seats" in the House.

White House aides were understandably furious. Said one ranking insider: "It was the most blatantly partisan election-night coverage that I have ever seen." Presidential Spokesman David Gergen telephoned Stahl during the broadcast to complain. She relayed the protest to Rather, but it apparently had no effect on him or his colleagues. Next day, on the CBS Evening News, Moyers opined that the elections had "crippled the Republican Party."

The networks brought to election light a nest of presumptions that had been established by influential print pundits. Syndicated Columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover hammered away about the burden imposed on all Republican candidates by Reaganomics. Joseph Kraft predicted that "the Democrats could pick up 30 to 40 [House] seats."

Tom Wicker of the New York Times forecast that concern over Administration designs on Social Security would drive many Republican-leaning elderly voters into the Democratic camp. And David Broder of the Washington Post performed an uncharacteristic double swerve: after ruminating two weeks before the election about "a landslide that may never land," he trumpeted six days before the voting that Democrats were "in striking range of control of the Senate." He then backed off four days later and guessed, correctly, that a standoff was the probable Senate result. As a group the commentators were like generals fighting the previous war. Having been surprised by the conservative landslide in 1980, the sages were primed to find the electorate speaking decisively once again. They turned ripples into tidal waves.

Many of the national pundits relied on regional newspaper and TV-station polls, which made some notable goofs. Surveys by the New York Daily News, Long Island's Newsday and a subsidiary of the Gannett News Service all gave Democratic Gubernatorial Nominee Mario Cuomo a final-week lead ranging from 9% to 13%; he won by 3%. The Illinois Governor's race brought on the worst polling failures: the Chicago Tribune found Republican Thompson ahead, 53% to 34%, and the Chicago Sun-Times had the race barely closer, 55% to 40%.

The most tangled polling errors came in California, where almost no one forecast Republican George Deukmejian's 50,000-vote victory over Tom Bradley. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times ran a frontpage story on election morning about the lineup of local politicians vying to succeed Bradley as the city's mayor. The San Francisco Chronicle's first election extra bannered: BRADLEY WIN PROJECTED. While ABC was predicting Deukmejian's victory, its affiliate stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco were using exit polls of their own to call the race for Bradley instead. In the Senate contest, several affiliates used local exit polls to forecast a victory for Democrat Jerry Brown, who actually lost to Republican Pete Wilson 51% to 45%.

At least one TV executive decided that the sound and fury did indeed signify nothing. Al Flanagan, station manager of NBC's Atlanta affiliate, WXIA, cut away from the network coverage to air a 1972 movie, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Said Flanagan: "The election was being force-fed to viewers."

Whatever the merits of the coverage, the victories that really interested NEC, ABC and CBS were not reported on Tuesday night but on Thursday, in the Nielsen ratings. They were a surprise: ABC, which pioneered the use of electronic whizbangery but which seemed low key, almost uninterested on Tuesday night, won with an average 11.8% of all U.S. television households. CBS, despite Rather's supercharged manner and a dazzling array of computer-generated graphics, was second, with 11.5%. NBC, with a presentation about halfway between CBS's dazzle and ABC's drowse (and with a stadium-type Scoreboard that was maddeningly difficult to read) ran its now customary distant third, with 9.3%.

Perhaps the lesson of these figures is that viewers prefer straight information and quiet talk to electronic bells and whistles. Certainly the perfervid claims of drama and import, when events were inconclusive, turned some viewers off. Television is incomparably compelling in covering real action, yet embarrassingly unconvincing when it tries to manufacture excitement. But there were some statistics that defied optimistic interpretations: the three networks together attracted less than a third of U.S. households on average; even among those who were home watching TV, nearly half turned to entertainment instead. Despite all their hubbub and hype, all their reaching for meaning, the networks have not yet found a way to make elections interesting to all of the people, even some of the time.

--By William A. Henry III

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.