Same Old Jive

The first step to overcome an addiction is to admit you have a problem. The MSM doesn't seem to understand that the information Genie is out of the bottle, that the old rules no longer apply. The big three Networks meet and wonder how they called election results wrong — again... of course! It's those pesky bloggers! Yeah, that's the ticket!

Major network news chiefs review election, look to future

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.

"We're not happy that the exit polls, even in the first wave, were wrong," said NBC News president Neal Shapiro at a joint appearance of network news presidents at Stanford University. "We're all reviewing it, it should have been better. I think there were mistakes, some of which we're trying to figure out, and some of which we can't."

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."

What crap. They've been caught flat-out peddling bias, bogus memos, recycling old stories, and calling a lead while polls are still open in the much of the country and they can only come up with the internet dog ate their homework?

Sorry Gentlemen, it's time to say Goodnight...network news is so over.