Election Special

It's the fifth one Project X. When I was reporting it, I telephoned the wonderful, delightful Bob Schieffer to ask him about calling elections on election night. Schieffer, who's now retired, was for a very long time the host of CBS's Face the Nation. The interview didn't really fit in the episode, but it's haunted me ever since this election season. Twitter's announced that it's going to slow the flow of information not so fast people keep saying about this year's voting,

So one question keep snagging me. How did we get so caught up in a fetish for speed in the first place. Honestly, what's the hurry? My daughter just always asked me to see, Dad, did you want to be a TV reporter when you were a little boy, and they didn't have TV when I was a little boy, come to Fort Worth until the eighth grade, and I remember very well we were going out to eat one night and we had this Mashican restaurant we always went to,

and we got out. There was an appliance store next door to the restaurant and we there was a little TV in the window and they had it on and I remember that's the first time I've ever seen TV and I was just mesmerized by it. My dad said, come on, I'm hungry, I don't have time to watch. So that was my introduction to television. Wow. And did your family watch the news when you then, like when

you're in high school? Oh? Absolutely. We always watched the news, and for some reason, and I don't really know why, I guess we watched CBS, although the local affiliate, and Fort Worth was an NBC station. But my mother once Walter Cronkite came along and all of that, she really liked Walter and so we kind of we kind of grew up with Hunley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. Yeah, yeah, you know, I had forgotten I went was watching the nineteen fifty two coverage. So it's Cronkite and Morrow and

then Charles Collingwood. I had forgotten how kind of dashing and debonair Cronkite was in the fifties. Yeah, Willie. And he had a mustache, which not many people on television journal his hand in those days. But he was he was very urbane, you know, and he had he'd been to World War Two and uh, you know, he had been you know, foreign correspondent, and so he'd been around

by that time. And a lot of people said that, you know, if Walter walked into a television station today, I'm applied for a job, he wouldn't get hired because he didn't look like a reporter. But he and he had that you know, that cadence in his voice, the soul correspondent and uh, you know, and nobody talks like that anyway, but Walter really did talk like that, and he talked like that off camera as well as uh

one camera. Yeah. Well, so trying to grapple here what the consequences are of the kind of explosion of information available to news broadcasters and reporters around elections that really, you know, this is kind of watershed moment in fifty two when CBS decides to try to predict the election the very night using the returns as they're coming in

that can be calculated with a Unix. CBS announced that they would be giving the fastest election prediction ever given, and that they would call the election before anyone else could call it, because I'm fifty two. The worry was like they would if they made a prediction, it would be wrong. But if they didn't make a prediction, no one would watch. And so they bring in this machine to grant legitimacy to their prediction, but then maybe they

lead us into a different kind of political trouble. So I would just love to hear your vantage about what it means to bring in computer and what we would now call, you know, big data into the newsroom on an election night. You know it's CBS. When we would talk about those early days, the thing that always surprised us is they brought in this computer and then when they got the results from the computer, they didn't believe it. They i didn't know if it was true or not,

and they were hesitant about reporting it. They held the information for a while, but the coming of the computers changed everything about election night. I mean, in our romantic rear view mirror, we look back and think about election nights when the family gathered around the radio and you know, they put on an extra cup of coffee and then they waited and waited for the returns to come in, and it was a lot of fun and in a

funny kind of way. Among other things. The computers sort of took the fun out of election night and changed it completely. I mean, you think back to you know, back when Woodrow Wilson in nineteen sixteen he went to bed thinking he had lost the presidency, and it was not till four days later that he found out that he had won. And down through the years that began, you know, to speed up a little bit. But with the coming of computers, it really changed everything. And some

people thought that was very unfair. They didn't like the idea they were going to find out in an hour or so who won the election. But in some cases that was that was exactly what happened. And so when you had those conversations, did anyone, I mean, aside from sort of looking backward with a little bit of wistfulness, did anybody ever say well, here's here's the way we

shouldn't be using them. Or were you at the table for some of those conversations over the years, you know, from the from the coming of the computers, from the coming of all technological uh advanced You know, the one thing about communications that is constant is it's always changing, and as we have seen over the years, it always gets faster. And the use of computers is like we

always do with new technology. And that goes all the way back to the invention of the machine gun, and you think about how many people died before the general's understood that the way to attack a machine gun is not to march your troops head on into machine gun fire.

You kind of go around to the side and just like now we're we're grappling with what to do with digital and all of that, and you know, we thought this was going to end all the problems and just make things faster, but we didn't understand the downside of these new technological advances. You think Facebook knew what the downside of what Zuckerberg had, you know, put on the

market there. I'm sure he didn't, nor did anyone else, but we always in its understandable well we always use technology before we completely understand it, and that was absolutely the case with the coming computers to election night. So what are the aside from taking the fun out of election night, what are the other consequences do you think for coverage or for how the elections themselves go. Well, the computers do make mistakes, and I mean the technology

is sometimes wrong. I mean, and what I always think about on election night. The first thing when people talk about computers and things like that is in nineteen eighty NBC called Ronald Reagan the winner at eight fifteen on election night. It was such a huge landslide over Jimmy Carter and Carter formally conceded at ten o'clock before the polls had even closed in the West, and Democrats were absolutely furious. Two Democrats, al Oleman and James Corman publicly

blamed Carter for their defeats out there. Whether that was the cause or not, they actually said it was his fault. Senator Warren Magnusson was also defeated because all these many races in the Western time zone had been affected by Carter's concession. House Speaker Tip O'Neill was so furious he exploded in a conversation with a Carter aid telling him you jerks came in like a bunch of jerks and

you're going out the same way. He was just absolutely furious, and Washington State Congressman Tom Foley said it was vintage Carter at his dead worst. And you know that, we began to think about then we'll wait a minute here. We've got the ability to do this. And the landslide was so overwhelming that was there just wasn't much question about whether it was right or not. It was right, but the impact was something that nobody had really thought

very much about until that time. And would that happen now? I mean, would people call a national election before the local contests had been decided? Well? I think it would depend. We instituted rules somewhere back that we never called a state until the polls had had closed in that state. If you had a situation, where would you call it

before eleven o'clock? I think that's an open question. If it was a huge and overwhelming landslide, I think it would be very difficult not to call it early in a presidential race, but generally we have tried not to do that. And would people ever, I mean trying to think about the different rule that the kinds of computers

that are available now to newsrooms would have. You know that first UNIVAC is this clunky thing, and as you say, you know, CBS didn't even believe it's prediction, didn't report on it initially. But you could know pretty early in a day on election day how things are looking because of computational models that your computer would be able to kind of five thirty eight. Uh, you know, I don't know, it's sort of the magical work of computer modeling that

could be done early on. Does that influence do you think how how the coverage unfolds over the course of the day. Oh? Absolutely, And and a lot of times, you know, early on we'll go in and we'll get our pulsers will tell us like it's CBS, uh, you know, it looks like, you know, somebody's going to carry Virginia. It looks like somebody's gonna you know, but we're not going to call that, and so we will the closest will come to that, as we'll say, you know, it's

leaning or something like that. But we we simply don't don't call any of those early poll closing results until the polls in that in that section have actually closed. But the other thing, Jill is the polls are just not as reliable as they once were, even even the EGXIT polling, where people now tend to sometimes not till the polsters. And what exit polling is is we just hire people to go out and stand outside the polls

and ask people how they voted. Well, some years back, when that first happened, people were happy to do it, and but now they sometimes lie to the people, they don't tell the truth, or they just simply won't won't talk to them because they're such well, we're in such

a partisan like atmosphere right now. I mean, what computers are doing on election day for a newsroom is making more information available more quickly and detecting patterns that would be hard for people working with pen and paper to detect. So at some level, what we're talking about is better evidence and more data and better information and more astute analysis.

And we will intuitively think, well, better evidence, more information, more student analysis, even kind of bracketing for a question the unreliability of polling data, but just thinking about other

forms of data that the computer would have previous. The returns from previous previous elections, the kind of kind of dog and pony show that you know on CNN when they have the hologram and they can make a three D interactive electoral map, and we suddenly can look at patterns over the last for presidential elections, and we can look at these county by county bits of information that it is a tremendous amount of evidence that has presented

to us. And in a demidocracy, we're supposed to be informed. Is there a version of the influence of computers on election day reporting that is a good story, that is about improvements to our specivic participation or our commitment to democratic institutions. I think we can both point to all the things that are kind of decaying around this. But what's the good side. Well, the good side is that

we still this information is still valuable. But I mean it's all part of this new world that we live in because we've undergone this this communication revolution that goes beyond just computers, I mean, the whole coming of the Internet. We are we have more information available to us than any people who've ever lived on Earth at any one time in the history of the world. But does anyone think we're or wiser or are we simply overwhelmed with so much information that we can't process it? And my

feeling is we're overwhelmed. We're still working our way through this, we're still trying to figure to figure all this out, and it has had an impact on the credibility of news organizations, and we find people more it's more difficult for people to believe anything now. And so the credibility of all news organizations every day of the year, uh is not what he wants. Was simply because we're just being drowned in more information than we can possibly process.

And I think I think this is all part of that. Yeah, no, very that's absolutely the case. But we we I think, do tend to still want to believe that datum does mean wisdom it. I mean, you're absolutely right, it does send to more information. But you know, Martin Luther thought the invention of the printing press was going to make everything just fine, that once people could read the Bible in their own language, that all of the problems and

controversies they had would all be worked out. But after the invention of the printing press, that we had thirty years of religious wars. It don't everybody all at once began to agree on things. And I think we're I think the coming of the Internet is having as profound an impact on our culture and Western cultures as the invention of the printing press had on the people of

its day. Yeah, although the inventing the printing press makes possible the rise of modern democracy, absolutely, so what does the invention of the internet make possible? Confusion? I think on the downside's there's no question, and we can get more information fast than at any any time in the history of the world. But just because we get it faster does not necessarily mean that it's going to work out all the problems. There are still just this myriad

problems that have to be resolved. But we're getting there. But you know, we just kind of haven't reached equilibrium yet. And the coming of the Internet and the use of computers on election night is just all part of that. Yeah. I was to my husband's a computer scientist at MIT, and I was asking him yesterday to give me some kind of a rule of thumb about the processing the capacity of a computer of the nineteen fifties relative to today. And I was sitting, of course with my laptop, you know,

my Mac in my lap. And he said, well, one measure would be you have more memory on your Mac sitting right here in this room than all the computer storage in the entire world in nineteen sixty. Yeah, just in terms of the storage of data, not even being

connected to the internet. Just what was on my hard drive. So, if you were giving the task of coming up with a plan for election date, election night coverage for twenty twenty, what would be a priority for you, Well, just to improve the accuracy and to I think I think the secret is it's it's not so much the use of the computers, but but the use of polling and finding polling. Uh. That polling is not more reliable, it's it's one of the things that has not improved. Polling has gotten worse,

not better. Uh, And we we're seeing that now on election night is as much as any other time. And finding a way to get polls that were as accurate as we used to have when you know, we'd do a national poll at CBS and we'd call, you know, five thousand people to get fifteen hundred people. Well, now we have to call thirty or forty thousand to get fifteen hundred people and even so you wonder who are the people that you're talking to you when you do a poll like that, And I think that's that's where

the I think that's where the improvement could come. And that's the part we have to work on. And it's also the reason we have to be extremely careful, I mean more careful than we've ever been before we broadcast anything, because as you now know, I mean, once information gets out. Now you know Mark Twain, what was it he said that a like can go around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on. And that's where

we are right now. I mean, what we're going through now, and just the reporting of the news is it's not the people have always made mistakes. They've always been part of some people that are trying to put out all stories. But the difference now is how quickly it gets it gets to the public. And you know, we all have to spend time now just sorting out where did this come from? Is it true? How did they know that? And that's that's what we've got, that's what we've got

to work on. But we also have got to be very careful in what we report. You know, historians talk a lot about this nineteen fifty two CBS election night. Um, and it doesn't sound like it's a vivid memory for you as a kid. But is it something that within CBS people talk about or their stories about that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean elections and how we cover them. It's always it's always a topic the topic around CBS News and you know, uh, political conventions, election years. People plan their

careers around those, those those big events. At least they did. They were still doing it in my day when when you know, when I was at there covering campaigns and stuff. So you're always trying to figure out and what you're always trying to figure out is how can you get the information before the other guys too, which is what, you know, one of the main things that journalism is about. And I think sometimes we spent more time thinking about how can we get the news first than we did

about what is the impact of the information we're getting. Yeah. You know, one thing we thought in two thousand that election night was going to go back to being an old fashioned election night. We were going into that election. We knew it was going to be very close, Gore versus Bush, and I remember on the night before election night. I told Ann Rather, I said, we are, and I said this on television. I said, We're going to have an old fashioned election night. We maybe up all night

before we know who wins this thing. Well under the heading of be careful what you wish for. You know what happened. It was December eleventh before we found out who or twelfth, I guess it was before we found out who who won that election, and it was it was. It was one of the worst nights CBS ever had. You know. We called Florida for Gore at seven forty that night, we recalled it at ten o'clock. Gore conceded,

then he took it back. Then CBS called Florida for Bush at two am, and then we had to take that back at four am. So we got we got an old fashioned election, all right, But it was something none of us had anticipated. But it's one of those nights I'll always remember. Yeah, I remember that night too, because I think it was one of the few nights I went to bed before it was resolved. I don't

know that there's been another one. The desire somehow to have it all settled before you turn out the night light is a very strong, very strong one from the other side, not being the journalist trying to get the news first, but being the listener and the viewer trying to find it out so I could just go to bed. I'm appreciating the speed in other reasons. Yeah, yeah, exactly this election night, don't stay up late, go to bed. The counting will take a while. Twenty twenty the Year

of slow voting. Good luck staying, saying and catching up on sleep, and we'll be back in the spring with a new season of the Last Archive about the rise of doubt, psychological warfare, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, Russian misinformation, fake pandemics, and maybe, but I hope not disputed elections. You won't believe what we've uncovered. I mean, you should believe it, but people don't believe anything anymore. Next season, believe it or not. The