"2,380 Bush supporters said they decided not to vote after hearing that Gore had won the state."
House GOP Miffed at Networks
By JIM ABRAMS
Associated Press Writer
Tauzin, left, and Cox
AP/Dennis Cook [18K]
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WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans on Thursday accused the television networks of being biased toward Vice President Al Gore in their election-night winner calls.
They said early calls for Gore could have affected the outcome in Florida and discouraged Republican voters in other parts of the country.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., said that by making early calls on states going to Gore and delaying calls on states Texas Gov. George W. Bush was carrying, ``you receive a picture of America believing that Al Gore was sweeping the country, that George W. Bush was having trouble carrying his states.''
He said there was a ``very disturbing picture, I think, of probable bias.''
Tauzin, chairman of the House Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications, said he plans to hold hearings on media coverage of the election either in December, when Congress returns to its lame-duck session, or more likely when the new Congress convenes in January.
CNN Chairman Tom Johnson, in two letters to Tauzin Thursday, said he would name an independent advisory committee to look into what went wrong in the news network's election night coverage. But he added that ``as chairman of CNN, I state categorically there was no intentional bias in the election night reporting.''
Su-Lin Nichols of ABC News said the network was undertaking a ``top to bottom review of our election night projections. ... We take this matter very seriously and intend to review all of the facts so that we can institute changes to ensure that this situation does not occur again.''
Tauzin claimed there were delays in calling nine states that Bush won by at least six percentage points but there were no delays in any state that Gore carried by six percentage points. His data used CNN as a source.
Between 7:49 p.m. and 8 p.m. EST Tuesday, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, ABC and The Associated Press all called Florida for Gore. Some two hours later the networks and the AP began pulling back that projection as actual voter count revealed how close the race was. Early Wednesday the networks declared the state for Bush, effectively giving him the presidency, but then had to retreat again when the vote ended in a near tie. The AP did not call the race for Bush, either in Florida or for the presidency.
Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said the early call giving Florida to Gore could have affected thousands of votes in the state's Panhandle, a stronghold for Bush where the polls closed an hour after the rest of the state because the area is in the central time zone.
Earlier this week, elections officials in at least three counties in the Florida Panhandle said they had no evidence of voters discouraged by the network calls. Brenda Renfroe, assistant supervisor of elections for Escambia County in Pensacola, Fla., said the television call was made only about 15 minutes before polls closed.
``I can't imagine anyone in line would have heard it, and we didn't have any reports of anyone walking away,'' Renfroe said.
But the centrist Republican Leadership Council said Thursday it had commissioned a phone survey of more than 35,000 Panhandle voters in which 2,380 Bush supporters said they decided not to vote after hearing that Gore had won the state.
Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., said giving Florida and other crucial states to Pennsylvania and Michigan to Gore while polls on the West Coast were still open was in part responsible for the second-lowest turnout in California since 1972. He said the outcome of several close House races in his state that went to Democrats may have been affected because Republican voters were discouraged.
Tauzin said that, in preparation for hearings, his staff would be talking to the Voter News Service about how election-night calls were made. VNS is a consortium of the networks and AP that uses voter exit polls and actual results to help make election projections.
Under a 1985 agreement, the networks usually have withheld using voter exit polls to call elections until most polls in a given state are closed.
Tauzin said the basis of his data came from work done by David Eisenhower, grandson of former President Eisenhower, who works for the Annenberg Project.
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