washingtonpost.com: Bloggers Let Poll Cat Out of the Bag

Bloggers Let Poll Cat Out of the Bag
By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 3, 2004; 10:39 AM

In the thick of a historic and obsessively watched Election Day, bloggers shook up the mainstream media by providing an early look at election exit polls, proving once and for all their influence not only in the coverage of politics but perhaps in the electoral process itself.

The early-afternoon posts of the numbers -- purportedly based on the data that media organizations get from people who have actually voted, which the media then use to predict outcomes and make correlations between votes and issues -- indicated bad news for President Bush, stoking early-afternoon chatter that grew to a roar and sparked a stock market sell-off.

Never mind that the posts were at times thinly sourced or turned out to be flat wrong. As the networks and other media standbys played it safe, people flocked to blogs to get a glimpse at early polling data and early calls. The traffic alone further boosted the street cred of blogs. The National Review's Corner, Daily Kos, Drudge Report and Wonkette.com were among those out of the box early with the data.

"Politically oriented Web logs began posting leaked exit poll data early yesterday afternoon, influencing media coverage of the race and underscoring the new medium's continued emergence as an opinion-shaper," the Wall Street Journal said. "The willingness of the individuals who run the Internet sites, known as blogs, to post the data as soon as they could obtain them -- by whatever means -- gave them a leg up on the nation's mainstream news organizations, which were bound by their own restrictions on disseminating exit-poll information. But the uncertain outcome of the election late into the night underscored how the high-profile new medium could ultimately prove vulnerable to the same gaffes that bedeviled the mainstream media four years ago."

More from the article: "Shortly before noon, several blogs began posting leaked exit-poll data showing that Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry was winning in key states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Many popular blogs saw their traffic soar as hundreds of thousands of additional visitors scoured them for clues about the election. Several sites -- Joshua Micah Marshall's left-leaning TalkingPointsMemo.com and Glenn Reynolds's conservative-leaning InstaPundit.com -- crashed repeatedly because of unusually heavy traffic," the Journal said. "The numbers helped shape early media coverage of Election Day and triggered a sell-off in the stock market by investors concerned about the implications of a Kerry victory. As the day wore on, however, the more detailed numbers that began appearing on network and cable television news programs made clear that the picture was far murkier, with Ohio being too close to call and several networks projecting President Bush as the winner in Florida."

But the article noted the importance of the blog race against the mainstream media outlets: "Many polling experts had warned that such shifts were almost inevitable since the bloggers were posting exit poll numbers hours before they could be considered reliable. ... The attention paid to blogs last night highlighted their increasing prominence in the worlds of politics and media."
• The Wall Street Journal: Brash Blogs Grab the Lead Again With Early Reports on Exit Polls (Subscription required)

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz latched onto the blog exit poll brouhaha in his review of election TV coverage: "The networks and the Associated Press began receiving exit-poll data in the early afternoon, and Slate.com and the Drudge Report touted the figures as showing Kerry with a slight edge in Florida and Ohio and significant leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. But the tone of the television coverage began to subtly turn against Kerry as the night wore on and it appeared that the senator was not doing as well in the key battlegrounds as the exit polls had indicated. In an echo of 2000, Lisa Myers reported on MSNBC that the Bush camp saw 'a significant flaw in the exit polls.' Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry sounded less than confident when he told [ABC anchor Peter Jennings] that 'we're not throwing in the towel' on Florida. 'Somebody should reassess exit polling. . . . It's useless,' said CNN's Tucker Carlson." For the record, Florida went to President Bush. Ohio is still officially in limbo land.

The Los Angeles Times gave the match point to blogs, but noted the accuracy of exit poll posts was often suspect: "Overflowing with early, and sometimes wildly misleading, exit poll numbers, Web logs became the Internet's own battleground state on Tuesday, as the bloggers fought even among themselves in reporting the kind of preliminary data television avoids before polls close. Some blogs were stuck between an ideological rock and a news-gathering hard place. Partisan blogs like the conservative National Review Online ... found themselves caught in a spirited debate about whether the early numbers they posted were hurting their preferred candidate, President Bush. The readers of liberal blogs such as Daily Kos ... staged an online pep rally celebrating early numbers showing Sen. John F. Kerry ahead in many swing states. As they have in the past, television networks and newspaper websites refrained from reporting early exit poll results, but the Internet adheres to little such restraint. Hours after the first polls opened on the East Coast, the Internet bustled with preliminary voter surveys, sparking an angry online debate among the wi-fi wonks over their posting and their significance. The attribution for (and authenticity of) these numbers was murky."
• The Washington Post: TV News Plays It Safe, Up to a Point (Registration required)
• The Los Angeles Times: Exit Polls Bog Down The Blogs (Registration required)

The Wall Street Journal Online weighed in with its own coverage of the exit poll scrapping in cyberspace, noting in a blog roundup: "Bloggers are crowing about yet another way the Internet is scooping TV, this time by the networks' own Web sites. There has apparently been a discrepancy between the caution typifying TV-news projections and the raw exit-poll data available on some of the networks' Web sites, as noted by the blogger NewDonkey.com and a reader on DailyKos.com. Just before the 10 p.m. poll closings, most of the TV networks were projecting a lead in the electoral vote for President Bush over Sen. John Kerry, but they weren't ready to call the crucial states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. They were only reporting figures based on precincts that had already turned in voting results. But surfers could find exit-poll data on CNN.com and MSNBC.com for each state where the polls had already closed. The tallies were separated by gender, but it wasn't tough for NewDonkey.com to calculate what the overall numbers showed, based on exit-poll numbers showing the breakdown of all voters by gender."
• The Wall Street Journal Online: Reporters, Pundits File Real-Time Web Updates (Subscription required)

The Baltimore Sun cut to the chase on the potential impact of the bloggers on exit poll reporting. In a nutshell, caution was thrown out the window. "The mainstream electronic media, still bruised from making bad calls in the 2000 election, ceded the dirty work to the new kid yesterday, allowing Internet news sites and Web logs to rule political reporting for much of the day -- for better or worse," the Sun reported. "By early afternoon, online bloggers had started listing early, and sometimes questionable, exit poll information that showed Sen. John Kerry leading President Bush in the three key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. By early evening, before most polls closed and the TV networks resumed reporting, a few blogs and news Web sites had called the race for Kerry. ... The bloggers were filling a void left by news outlets reluctant to speculate, though much of their information was based on rumors or postings of their peers, causing some others concern. They are 'putting up exit polls and things like that, and they're based on almost nothing,' said Ann Althouse, a blogger and law professor from Madison, Wis. 'They seem to want to affect things in bizarre ways. What the good bloggers, the reasonable bloggers, are trying to do is keep mainstream media honest.'"
• The Baltimore Sun: Bloggers Rule the Day in Earlier Reporting

Criticisms aside, bloggers seemed to win the popularity contest. "The popularity of Internet political sites had built in the months leading up to the election -- political bloggers who had once received a few hundred hits per day reported hundreds of thousands of visitors. The surge of popularity was clear from the strains on the relatively new technology: Some of the one-person-show blogs seemed like they were having technical problems more often than they were running smoothly," wrote Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle. "As the outcome of the election became more clear, it was once again the Internet sources that made the first move, calling individual states and the entire election long before their televised competitors."

Despite traffic surges and server glitches, the blogs got this standing ovation from Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press for making a dent in the political reporting process: "Say whatever you want about this presidential campaign setting new highs in low blows. For the Internet, this was a true coming of age as a forceful mass medium. The fact that the Internet was probably responsible for as much of the bias and bitterness in this year's campaigns as the traditional big media that it delights in castigating is another matter. One thing that we can be sure will be remembered about this campaign is that it was the year of the blogs -- Web logs, or online journals and diaries kept by so-called citizen journalists, sometimes dubbed 'pajama people' because so many write from home during off hours."
• The San Francisco Chronicle: Web Sites Provide Alternative to Wary TV Coverage
• The Detroit Free Press: A Swirl of Spins in the Blogosphere

From the Mouths of Blogs

So what exactly did the bloggers say that set off such a firestorm? After posting a list of early poll numbers, under the heading "A Little Birdie Told Us," Ana Marie Cox wrote: "I have been asked to clarify: The little birdie is not Joe Trippi nor anyone he works with. In fact, the little birdie is really skittish and not exactly trustworthy in all cases. Please vote, even if you live in PA. These could be total forgeries, designed to keep you from voting. As a friend put it, 'The Yankees always figure out a way to win.'"

Josh Marshall wrote in a 5:09 p.m. ET post, after linking to Mark Blumenthal's MysteryPollster at 12:46 p.m. to further explain exit poll numbers: "Well, if our servers had to go down, I'm at least glad it could happen today, right? Jeez, what friggin' nightmare. As you may have noticed TPM was offline from about 1:45 PM until just before 5 PM. Right about exactly the time I got hold of the first good exit poll numbers everything started to go haywire. It's still not completely clear what happened. But we seem to have it under control." Oh, to be famous.

Writer Andrew Sullivan on his Daily Dish blog did a little backpedaling at 12:30 p.m. on some earlier posts of exit poll numbers. "Those numbers I posted, as I wrote at the time, may well not hold up throughout the day. A few look way off to me, as I wrote. But few GOP bigwigs are disputing that the early exit numbers are not encouraging for Bush. Oh, and whomever you're voting for, for Pete's sake, don't be put off by exit polls. As I said earlier, they are not accounting for early voting, and some seem to have a heavy female bias. They are a blur of a blur. So stay tuned. And vote."

Early poll poster and Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas hedged his own bets by writing at one point yesterday after a list of exit poll numbers: "In 2000, the early numbers favored Bush. In 2002, exit polling was terribly innacurate. Exit polling also doesn't account for absentee and early ballots. And it's still early in the day. PA and MN will be much closer than these number indicate. So please, please take with a giant grain of sand."

The Houston Chronicle explained of the blog posts that "caution was thrown to the wind on the Internet, where bloggers released results of exit polls throughout the day and night. How or whether the publishing of poll results affected Tuesday's vote was impossible to determine, but sites such as wonkette.com and slate.com were unapologetic in publishing the same raw data available to the networks. Slate.com, for example, noted that the consortium subscribing to the National Election Pool, which conducts the polls, has 'signed a blood oath not to divulge it to unauthorized eyes ... but the numbers always leak out to other journalists, such as the writers at Slate.' 'Slate believes its readers should know as much about the unfolding election as the anchors and other journalists, so given the proviso that the early numbers are no more conclusive than the midpoint score of a baseball game, we're publishing the exit-poll numbers as we receive them,' read a posting."
• The Houston Chronicle: Networks Cautious as Bloggers Risk It

Market Impact

The Wall Street Journal's piece on blogs noted that the markets reacted to the early postings. "The most popular blogs rarely attract more than 100,000 visits a day, a sliver of what broadcast networks draw. Still, they appeared to have an clear impact yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average began falling almost immediately after several sites posted initial data indicating a possible win for Sen. Kerry. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 18.66, or 0.19 percent, to 10,035.73. Perhaps more significantly, the blogs seem likely to have a significant impact on the way the traditional media cover future elections, since their willingness to post the early data could put network and cable television under mounting pressure to follow suit as a way of staying relevant. The blogs' willingness to use exit data angered some network executives."

Reuters said, "U.S. stocks reversed course suddenly on Tuesday and drifted lower as chatter on the Internet speculated that early exit polls had Sen. John Kerry leading the presidential election in key swing states." CBS MarketWatch.com reported on the market sell-off, which was sparked by early poll numbers being leaked. "U.S. stocks staged a late-day sell-off Tuesday, with blue chips snapping a five-session winning streak to end lower and the Nasdaq paring gains amid reports that Sen. John Kerry is putting in a strong early showing at the polls," the news outlet said. "The Nasdaq Composite edged up 4.92 points to 1,984.79, ending at a four-month high but off its best levels for the session when it reached the 2,000 mark for the first time since July 2. The S&P 500 Index ended fractionally higher, up 0.07 points at 1,130.58. Stocks pulled back as online sources leaked unconfirmed raw data from early exit polls."
• Reuters: Blogs Send Stocks Into Reverse
• CBS MarketWatch.com: Stocks Spooked by Early Election Call
• The Los Angeles Times: Sell-Off Blamed on Early Signs of Kerry Lead (Registration required)

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