The Media By TOM LITTLEWOOD

Declaring the winners; reporting 'The Truth'

EVERYONE knows that Ronald Reagan carried Illinois in "a landslide," but how many are aware that his share of the vote cast for president in 1980 turned out to be less than a majority — 49.65 percent, to be precise? This is a good lesson to remember while awaiting news reports of the November 2 election. In their competitive rush to judgment, the media are more concerned with declaring winners quickly than in clarifying the details later.

That the election night reporting system works as well and as fast as it does is a marvel of human organization. Before every election, the wire services and broadcasting networks form a consortium to tally the figures. Returns are phoned from precincts all over the state to a tabulation center in New York. For the races of national interest — this year governor and Congress — running totals and county-by-county tables whiz back to Illinois on highspeed printers. The trick is in finding, not reliable computers that won't blow their circuits, but nearly 6,000 reliable people who can be depended upon to call New York with the results as soon as they are available.

This time the system managers hope to assign individual messengers to each of the approximately 5,500 precincts in Cook County. At least one reporter and sometimes more are designate in every other county. The reporters may be journalists or teachers or, in metropolitan areas, members of a club enjoying an exciting evening while enriching the club treasury.

Though most Illinois precincts now vote on punch cards, some of the tabulating is done at the courthouse or at some central computer location, which complicates the planning. Even with all the meticulous advance arrangements, some of the messengers are never heard from. An entire county may be blank throughout the evening. Occasionally a sleepy clerk in one of the smaller counties will simply suspend counting until the next day.

The networks speed the process with their own sample precinct analysis and exit polling. An exit poll questions a sampling of voters on their way out. Properly done, an exit poll will determine the winner in all but very close races, while people are still voting.

It is left to a separate backup operation based in Chicago, using the same ragtag army of precinct messengers, to mop up the lesser state offices at a slower pace. Both are fragmentary systems at best, in which the pieces fall into place in no particular order, and a without the minor party candidates, but which do serve the purpose of identifying as many winners as possible before bedtime.

The chain gang revisited

"The problem I'm afraid, is that as a writer my commitment is to something that, God help me, I think of as The Truth,
and as a feminist my commitment is to the women's movement."
— Nora Ephron in "Crazy Salad."

Now that the halls of the Statehouse are quiet again, the women reporters who covered the long-running ERA story and with whom I talked later, agree that it was an extraordinarily difficult assignment. They had to be as objective as their male colleagues and more. They had to be forever conscious of the necessity of avoiding the appearance of support for either side, beginning with the clothing they wore.

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Because the demonstrators chose to symbolize their respective causes by costuming themselves in green and red, the journalists put their green and red clothes in the closet for the duration.

Whatever temptations might have existed to color the news were worn away by the pressure of tough continuous news judgments, and the bizarre behavior of some of the newsmakers. "Both sides got so obnoxious at different times that it helped us remain objective," remarked Barbara Hipsman of the Belleville News-Democrat. She said she asked to be relieved of one analysis story assignment near the end "because I didn't want to take a chance of writing something that could be interpreted as possibly entering the fray."

For the most part, the problems of reporting the many crisscrossing features were unrelated to the sex of the reporters. In effect, the pressroom pack was "chained" to the sensational antics of a few, without adequate time to explore who the protesters were and what had driven them to their extreme actions.

After it was over, UPI bureau chief Karen Magnuson acknowledged that competitive pressure had caused her and others to overreport the doings of the fasters and then of the more unpredictable chainers, as they were known in the pressroom. But the story was of such national interest that both wire services were instructed by their New York offices to produce fresh leads twice a day. Knowing this, the leaders of some of the protesting factions made themselves regularly available for interviews just before filing deadlines.

Media manipulation? Perhaps. To be effective in this video age of political theater, the actors must be wise to the dynamics of competitive pack journalism. They must understand wire service cycles and broadcast actualities — the media appetite for ever more enthralling angles to developing stories. Under the most trying circumstances, the men and the women in their beige outfits acquitted themselves well by being faithful to what they "think of as The Truth."

October 1982 | Illinois Issues | 37