Reply #11: Editor for Canadian TV Observing Elec. Nite from ABC Headquarters [View All]

[dzika]

(thanks to Karenca)

The ABC's of Bush Country
Sean O'Malley, CTV Foreign Editor

.....In the morning, political director Mark Halpern presided over a conference call with all the political reporters, producers and editors. (His daily note, posted on the ABC website by 11 am, had such cult status among Washington insiders that it was the subject of a New Yorker magazine feature). He indicated that the overnight polls had given Bush a bump, but everyone remarked how downcast Bush seemed when he met the press outside a polling station near his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Did Bush know something we didn't?

The closest we came to outing ourselves was when the late afternoon exit polls began to seep out. Kerry was winning in every contested state. Not only did it look like Kerry was going to win, it looked like it wasn't even going to be close. As it turned out there was no need to be at ABC to get the inside dirt.

Revealing internal polling to outsiders was verboten anyway at ABC, but in the age of Internet bloggers the news was everywhere if you knew where to look. All ABC did was let us know it was time to start looking. We all told our newsrooms what we knew and waited for the polls to close and make it official. Paul Dolan, the ABC executive who had invited us to New York and whose office we were working it, immediately began receiving calls from newsrooms around the world. The appearance of neutrality in foreign newsrooms turned out to be as illusory as that debate at the UN. One European editor told Dolan the champagne was chilling and the corks were ready to pop.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Kerry's coronation. As the hours ticked by and the official results poured in, the numbers weren't jiving with the exit polls. Bush started strong and stayed strong. The phone stopped ringing. When ABC called Florida for Bush an hour before midnight (the exit polls had Kerry ahead), my colleagues in the foreign press looked like they had been punched in the stomach. One of them started furiously playing around with an interactive website that allowed you to click each state red or blue to tally possible Electoral College final result scenarios.....

continued...
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1103937048108_3

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