Press: Like a Suburban Swimming Pool

NBC is first with a splash of Reagan blue, but Cronkite scores

For millions of viewers who had settled in with snacks and drinks for a long night of watching election returns, it was like an eagerly awaited heavyweight championship that ends with a knockout eleven seconds into the first round. At 6 p.m. E.S.T., an hour before Election Night coverage got under way at the three networks, CBS News President Bill Leonard confidently collected a bet from a Carter backer, proclaiming, “It’s gonna be an early night.” At NBC, John Chancellor signed on at 7:00 with the prediction that “Ronald Reagan will win a very substantial victory tonight, very substantial.” In fact, by the time ABC made the night’s first official call—Reagan in Indiana, at 6:30, one minute ahead of NBC, two ahead of CBS—news executives at all three shops had exchanged hunches with one another. All three agreed that their Election Day “exit” surveys of voters leaving the polls pointed to a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan. Still there remained the painstaking process of reporting votes from selected precincts, in order to call the states one by one. At least, that’s the way it was at CBS and ABC.

But something funny was happening on the 24-ft. by 14-ft. plastic and Plexiglas map at NBC, behind which a team of electricians waited to flick switches that would illuminate 7,324 light bulbs—red ones for Carter, blue for Reagan, white for Anderson. States were turning peacock blue faster than John Chancellor and his team could announce them. Looking over his shoulder at the epidemic of blue, David Brinkley observed: “It’s beginning to look like a suburban swimming pool.” Other NBC staffers took to calling it “Lake Reagan.” New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware and South Carolina (18 electoral votes) fell into the drink with a resounding splash at 8:15:21 p:m. E.S.T., and NBC flashed the words REAGAN WINS! on the home screens. Thus the network that has been mired in third place in ratings had won the prize for speed.

Over at CBS, Walter Cronkite, anchoring his last election before he retires next year, heard the news as he was reporting his network’s latest electoral vote total for Reagan: 67. Viewers tuned to CBS may have been confused when Cronkite suddenly launched into a rather huffy defense of his network’s methods of projecting winners. Taking a slap at “socalled exit polling, in which voters are interviewed when they leave the polling place,” Cronkite insisted: “We make our estimates on the basis of sample precincts, of actual voters casting votes in those precincts.”

The reason for this lecture was evident soon enough at all three networks: 90 minutes after the NBC call, President Carter walked into his Washington campaign headquarters and conceded defeat. Carter evidently was less cautious in recognizing reality than Cronkite. CBS finally gave the election to Reagan at 10:33 p.m., ABC at 9:52 p.m.

What had happened? NBC had pulled the rug out from under its competitors by secretly switching the rules for its Election Night victory calls. While ABC and CBS analysts cautiously awaited voting results from their 7,000 sample precincts, NBC executives decided to use their exit polls as a basis for calling many states rather than wait for any real vote counts. NBC’S reasoning: in a landslide, there is no place for punctilio.

Walter Cronkite soon made up for lost time by scoring a remarkable coup: a three-way interview with former President Gerald Ford at the anchor desk with him in New York and President-elect Reagan in Los Angeles. Earlier, Ford had tried unsuccessfully to phone Reagan. So as the President-elect left the Century Plaza Hotel after claiming victory, CBS Correspondent Bill Plante persuaded him to hold a network headset to his ear and trade long-distance pleasantries with Cronkite and Ford. Said Ford: “You’ll make a fine President.” Responded Reagan: “This victory is certainly yours to share.”

ABC was not so cool under fire. Shocked by the 8:15:21 bomb, ABC’s crew rushed to catch up—and proceeded to call two races wrong. Retracting his prediction of victory for incumbent Governor William Clinton in Arkansas, a slightly sheepish Max Robinson called Clinton’s defeat “a stunning upset.”

As the evening wound down to the last few computer-generated graphic bumps and grinds, NBC’s fast draw was drawing as much comment in certain quarters as the election itself. CBS News’ Bill Leonard insisted, while sipping a Coke, that NBC’s cannonball finish was “small beer.” He added: “We all knew it was going to be a landslide. If one horse is a foot from the finish line and all the others have fallen down, calling the race then or waiting until he finishes is a technicality, perhaps. Did CBS tell you Carter was winning?” San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, for one, complained when NBC’s early prediction effectively ended the race three hours before the polls closed in her state.

In reply, NBC News President William Small snapped: “In 18 years as a journalist, I’ve lived in a number of places where the best thing you could do to keep an election honest was to report it as quickly as you could. “Small admitted that the crew at NBC was fairly aglow over winning the call-’em-first race. So, evidently, was he. Rubbing it in, he declared a bit condescendingly: “The mystery to us is why the others weren’t doing it quicker.”

—By Janice Castro.

Reported by Elizabetg Rudulph/New York