11/08/2006

ABC wins the election-night ratings race; assessment begins of polling results

By DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- A savvy last-minute scheduling shift enabled ABC News' Charles Gibson to claim bragging rights as television's elections source of choice in his first prime-time competition with NBC's Brian Williams and Katie Couric of CBS.

Meanwhile, news organizations pronounced themselves generally satisfied Wednesday with their exit polling and vote counting systems, despite some concerns. With caution the byword, the national organizations made no wrong calls with the information they received.

Gibson, Williams and Couric were back on the air quickly Wednesday as all networks ran two special reports on President Bush's news conference and his announcement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Couric, flying to Washington, was late and had Harry Smith fill in at the beginning of the first report.

All three broadcast networks had promised one hour of coverage Tuesday starting at 10 p.m. ET. But on Tuesday afternoon, ABC announced that it was pre-empting its half-hour comedy "Help Me Help You" for an extra 30 minutes of news coverage.

Not only did that give ABC a half-hour head start on its rivals, it enabled Gibson to take advantage of directly following "Dancing with the Stars," a major hit seen by more than 20 million people Tuesday.

As a result, ABC's elections coverage was seen by 9.7 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research. NBC had 7 million viewers and CBS 6.3 million, Nielsen said.

Overall, including network and cable viewers, a total of 31.4 million people watched midterm elections coverage Tuesday, up from the 26.3 million who watched in 2002, Nielsen said.

ABC News President David Westin said he asked last Thursday for the extra half hour, mindful of how important the midterm election was during a time of war. He said he got the OK Tuesday morning to bump the sitcom.

The ratings edge was timely given that viewers are still becoming accustomed to Gibson, Williams and Couric in their new roles.

"This was Charlie's first election as an anchor," Westin said. "It was my first election without Peter (Jennings) and the news division's first election without Peter ... It was very important that we do a very strong job."

Election-night ratings tend to resemble viewership for the evening news, where Gibson has been second to Williams the last two months. In 2004, NBC with Tom Brokaw was easily the most popular election-night broadcast.

Among the cable networks, Fox News Channel averaged 3.1 million viewers in prime time, CNN had 3 million and MSNBC had 1.9 million, Nielsen said. CNN beat Fox in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic sought by advertisers.

During 2004 election coverage -- a happier time for the Republicans who dominate Fox's audience -- Fox beat CNN by nearly 2 million viewers.

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, which conducts exit polls for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press, made several changes this year after early data leaked in 2004 gave the misleading indication that Democrat John Kerry was headed to victory in the presidential election.

When early data came in Tuesday suggesting a strong Democratic showing in the midterm, several network experts believed the pollsters hadn't corrected the 2004 tendency to overestimate Democratic strength.

"I didn't think there was this big a Democratic wave," said Sheldon Gawiser, NBC News elections director. He was particularly suspicious about polling in Pennsylvania, where results eventually showed GOP Sen. Rick Santorum losing by a margin of 59 to 41 percent.

The experts said they needed to do a detailed analysis of the data to fairly grade the pollsters' performance. Dan Merkle, ABC's decision-desk director, said he saw problems with poll data in Ohio, Minnesota and Connecticut, for example.

"It doesn't look quite as bad as it did in 2004 but it's definitely something we have to look into," Merkle said.

A Fox News Channel commentator said on the air Tuesday that the numbers looked "out of whack." Joseph Lenski, Edison's executive director, said he hadn't received any complaints from Fox or any network. A Fox representative didn't return a phone call Wednesday.

News organizations said they were happy with their "quarantine room," where their representatives were kept from releasing any early exit-poll information until 5 p.m. ET.

"It just seemed like Election Day was so much calmer without knowing all this stuff at 1 o'clock," said Kathleen Frankovic, CBS News director of surveys.

The television networks depended on the AP to count actual votes. While network representatives said some of the House results came in slower than expected, they had been warned this might happen because so many counties were using new polling equipment.

"In many ways, yesterday appeared to be AP's best election night effort ever, and that's saying something after nearly 160 years of counting votes," Thomas Curley, the AP's president and CEO, said in a message to his staff Wednesday. "With razor-thin vote margins and more than half the country using new machines to cast ballots, anything could have happened -- but didn't."
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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is a division of CBS Corp. NBC is owned by General Electric Co. Fox News Channel is owned by News Corp. CNN is a division of Time Warner.