Media for Kerry
Others (
Betsy Newmark &
Lorie Byrd) have focused on the part of
this article where the Kerry campaign complains about their coverage by the media. That is indeed quite silly as Betsy & Lorie point out.
But get this part:
After Fox News called Ohio for President Bush on Election Night, John Kerry's aides began phoning top executives at the other networks to urge them to hold off, while White House adviser Karl Rove pressed them to join Fox in making the call. CBS, ABC and CNN made no projection in Ohio, and NBC had called Ohio before the Democrats reached the network.
"It's perfectly appropriate to call a network and make that case," says Kerry adviser Howard Wolfson, when "we have a set of facts and figures at our disposal to help them make the right call."
Maybe it was appropriate for the Kerry campaign to make that call. But note how effective the call was in getting the media to stop from calling Ohio for Bush. Two networks had predicted a Bush win in the Buckeye State before the calls, no network predicted a Bush win after the calls. CNN didn't call Ohio for Bush until the Kerry campaign conceded the state; I'd suspect but don't know for certain that ABC and CBS did the same. I know about CNN because I'd left their site up Tuesday night/Wednesday morning after going to bed and was quite startled when I noticed over breakfast that they still did not show Bush with more than 270 electoral votes.
In the end, Ohio went for Bush by a larger margin (2.5%) than Pennsylvania went for Kerry (2.1%). Just as in 2000, the networks were much more cautious in calling states for Bush than they were for the Democratic candidate.
