CDR: How the Net gave the right Florida count
My article you received late last night: "Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election" http://www.politechbot.com/p-01481.html Seems to have been the first article anywhere (3:35 am) to report that Bush's lead in Florida had dwindled to the hundreds, although CBS at approximately the same time had mentioned those numbers on the air. The politech article also appears to be the first to predict a recount. According to a wire service search, Dow Jones Newswire moved a similar article three minutes after the politech message (3:38 am), though it did not mention a recount: "WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Vice President Al Gore now trails Texas Governor George W. Bush by only 629 votes in Florida, throwing the U.S. election results into question, CBS News reported early Wednesday." AP had moved an advisory about 20 minutes before (3:11 am) saying that Bush's lead was in the thousands: "The lead in Florida for George W. Bush has dwindled to about 6,000 in the vote count." Dow Jones, in an article distributed at the same time (3:08 am), called the election even with those thousands of votes outstanding: "In an election that ultimately came down to a few thousand votes in Florida, Texas Governor George W. Bush has won the race for the presidency holding off a strong challenge from Vice President Al Gore." The networks, of course, had called the election for Bush at 2:17 am, after incorrectly saying earlier in the evening that Florida would go to Gore. Part of this mess comes from how mainstream media sources relied on Voter News Service for their results. For instance, CNN reported at 3:45 am that the Florida results were 2,890,321 (Bush) and 2,884,261 (Gore). That spread was still about 6,000 votes. For my politech article, I used the Net to go directly to the Florida secretary of state's website. The numbers there were about 20 minutes newer than CNN had at the same time. To their credit, CBS News apparently switched to those same numbers, although their hasty calculation of a 629 vote difference was incorrect. -Declan
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Declan McCullagh