Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the paper
Speaker 1: ballots go, a ballot box somewhere, I hope. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Last Archive Special Election Edition. I'm Jill Lapour. How
Speaker 1: will we know the results of the twenty twenty election?
Speaker 1: And when? Last year? On the Last Archive we did
Speaker 1: a whole episode about the prediction of election results and
Speaker 1: how all that changed in nineteen fifty two. Turn back
Speaker 1: the hands of your clock and go listen to that episode.
Speaker 1: It's the fifth one Project X. When I was reporting it,
Speaker 1: I telephoned the wonderful, delightful Bob Schieffer to ask him
Speaker 1: about calling elections on election night. Schieffer, who's now retired,
Speaker 1: was for a very long time the host of CBS's
Speaker 1: Face the Nation. The interview didn't really fit in the episode,
Speaker 1: but it's haunted me ever since this election season. Twitter's
Speaker 1: announced that it's going to slow the flow of information
Speaker 1: not so fast people keep saying about this year's voting,
Speaker 1: So one question keep snagging me. How did we get
Speaker 1: so caught up in a fetish for speed in the
Speaker 1: first place. Honestly, what's the hurry? My daughter just always
Speaker 1: asked me to see, Dad, did you want to be
Speaker 1: a TV reporter when you were a little boy, and
Speaker 1: they didn't have TV when I was a little boy,
Speaker 1: come to Fort Worth until the eighth grade, and I
Speaker 1: remember very well we were going out to eat one
Speaker 1: night and we had this Mashican restaurant we always went to,
Speaker 1: and we got out. There was an appliance store next
Speaker 1: door to the restaurant and we there was a little
Speaker 1: TV in the window and they had it on and
Speaker 1: I remember that's the first time I've ever seen TV
Speaker 1: and I was just mesmerized by it. My dad said,
Speaker 1: come on, I'm hungry, I don't have time to watch.
Speaker 1: So that was my introduction to television. Wow. And did
Speaker 1: your family watch the news when you then, like when
Speaker 1: you're in high school? Oh? Absolutely. We always watched the news,
Speaker 1: and for some reason, and I don't really know why,
Speaker 1: I guess we watched CBS, although the local affiliate, and
Speaker 1: Fort Worth was an NBC station. But my mother once
Speaker 1: Walter Cronkite came along and all of that, she really
Speaker 1: liked Walter and so we kind of we kind of
Speaker 1: grew up with Hunley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I had forgotten I went was watching the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two coverage. So it's Cronkite and Morrow and
Speaker 1: then Charles Collingwood. I had forgotten how kind of dashing
Speaker 1: and debonair Cronkite was in the fifties. Yeah, Willie. And
Speaker 1: he had a mustache, which not many people on television
Speaker 1: journal his hand in those days. But he was he
Speaker 1: was very urbane, you know, and he had he'd been
Speaker 1: to World War Two and uh, you know, he had
Speaker 1: been you know, foreign correspondent, and so he'd been around
Speaker 1: by that time. And a lot of people said that,
Speaker 1: you know, if Walter walked into a television station today,
Speaker 1: I'm applied for a job, he wouldn't get hired because
Speaker 1: he didn't look like a reporter. But he and he
Speaker 1: had that you know, that cadence in his voice, the
Speaker 1: soul correspondent and uh, you know, and nobody talks like
Speaker 1: that anyway, but Walter really did talk like that, and
Speaker 1: he talked like that off camera as well as uh
Speaker 1: one camera. Yeah. Well, so trying to grapple here what
Speaker 1: the consequences are of the kind of explosion of information
Speaker 1: available to news broadcasters and reporters around elections that really,
Speaker 1: you know, this is kind of watershed moment in fifty
Speaker 1: two when CBS decides to try to predict the election
Speaker 1: the very night using the returns as they're coming in
Speaker 1: that can be calculated with a Unix. CBS announced that
Speaker 1: they would be giving the fastest election prediction ever given,
Speaker 1: and that they would call the election before anyone else
Speaker 1: could call it, because I'm fifty two. The worry was
Speaker 1: like they would if they made a prediction, it would
Speaker 1: be wrong. But if they didn't make a prediction, no
Speaker 1: one would watch. And so they bring in this machine
Speaker 1: to grant legitimacy to their prediction, but then maybe they
Speaker 1: lead us into a different kind of political trouble. So
Speaker 1: I would just love to hear your vantage about what
Speaker 1: it means to bring in computer and what we would
Speaker 1: now call, you know, big data into the newsroom on
Speaker 1: an election night. You know it's CBS. When we would
Speaker 1: talk about those early days, the thing that always surprised
Speaker 1: us is they brought in this computer and then when
Speaker 1: they got the results from the computer, they didn't believe it.
Speaker 1: They i didn't know if it was true or not,
Speaker 1: and they were hesitant about reporting it. They held the
Speaker 1: information for a while, but the coming of the computers
Speaker 1: changed everything about election night. I mean, in our romantic
Speaker 1: rear view mirror, we look back and think about election
Speaker 1: nights when the family gathered around the radio and you know,
Speaker 1: they put on an extra cup of coffee and then
Speaker 1: they waited and waited for the returns to come in,
Speaker 1: and it was a lot of fun and in a
Speaker 1: funny kind of way. Among other things. The computers sort
Speaker 1: of took the fun out of election night and changed
Speaker 1: it completely. I mean, you think back to you know,
Speaker 1: back when Woodrow Wilson in nineteen sixteen he went to
Speaker 1: bed thinking he had lost the presidency, and it was
Speaker 1: not till four days later that he found out that
Speaker 1: he had won. And down through the years that began,
Speaker 1: you know, to speed up a little bit. But with
Speaker 1: the coming of computers, it really changed everything. And some
Speaker 1: people thought that was very unfair. They didn't like the
Speaker 1: idea they were going to find out in an hour
Speaker 1: or so who won the election. But in some cases
Speaker 1: that was that was exactly what happened. And so when
Speaker 1: you had those conversations, did anyone, I mean, aside from
Speaker 1: sort of looking backward with a little bit of wistfulness,
Speaker 1: did anybody ever say well, here's here's the way we
Speaker 1: shouldn't be using them. Or were you at the table
Speaker 1: for some of those conversations over the years, you know,
Speaker 1: from the from the coming of the computers, from the
Speaker 1: coming of all technological uh advanced You know, the one
Speaker 1: thing about communications that is constant is it's always changing,
Speaker 1: and as we have seen over the years, it always
Speaker 1: gets faster. And the use of computers is like we
Speaker 1: always do with new technology. And that goes all the
Speaker 1: way back to the invention of the machine gun, and
Speaker 1: you think about how many people died before the general's
Speaker 1: understood that the way to attack a machine gun is
Speaker 1: not to march your troops head on into machine gun fire.
Speaker 1: You kind of go around to the side and just
Speaker 1: like now we're we're grappling with what to do with
Speaker 1: digital and all of that, and you know, we thought
Speaker 1: this was going to end all the problems and just
Speaker 1: make things faster, but we didn't understand the downside of
Speaker 1: these new technological advances. You think Facebook knew what the
Speaker 1: downside of what Zuckerberg had, you know, put on the
Speaker 1: market there. I'm sure he didn't, nor did anyone else,
Speaker 1: but we always in its understandable well we always use
Speaker 1: technology before we completely understand it, and that was absolutely
Speaker 1: the case with the coming computers to election night. So
Speaker 1: what are the aside from taking the fun out of
Speaker 1: election night, what are the other consequences do you think
Speaker 1: for coverage or for how the elections themselves go. Well,
Speaker 1: the computers do make mistakes, and I mean the technology
Speaker 1: is sometimes wrong. I mean, and what I always think
Speaker 1: about on election night. The first thing when people talk
Speaker 1: about computers and things like that is in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: NBC called Ronald Reagan the winner at eight fifteen on
Speaker 1: election night. It was such a huge landslide over Jimmy
Speaker 1: Carter and Carter formally conceded at ten o'clock before the
Speaker 1: polls had even closed in the West, and Democrats were
Speaker 1: absolutely furious. Two Democrats, al Oleman and James Corman publicly
Speaker 1: blamed Carter for their defeats out there. Whether that was
Speaker 1: the cause or not, they actually said it was his fault.
Speaker 1: Senator Warren Magnusson was also defeated because all these many
Speaker 1: races in the Western time zone had been affected by
Speaker 1: Carter's concession. House Speaker Tip O'Neill was so furious he
Speaker 1: exploded in a conversation with a Carter aid telling him
Speaker 1: you jerks came in like a bunch of jerks and
Speaker 1: you're going out the same way. He was just absolutely furious,
Speaker 1: and Washington State Congressman Tom Foley said it was vintage
Speaker 1: Carter at his dead worst. And you know that, we
Speaker 1: began to think about then we'll wait a minute here.
Speaker 1: We've got the ability to do this. And the landslide
Speaker 1: was so overwhelming that was there just wasn't much question
Speaker 1: about whether it was right or not. It was right,
Speaker 1: but the impact was something that nobody had really thought
Speaker 1: very much about until that time. And would that happen now?
Speaker 1: I mean, would people call a national election before the
Speaker 1: local contests had been decided? Well? I think it would depend.
Speaker 1: We instituted rules somewhere back that we never called a
Speaker 1: state until the polls had had closed in that state.
Speaker 1: If you had a situation, where would you call it
Speaker 1: before eleven o'clock? I think that's an open question. If
Speaker 1: it was a huge and overwhelming landslide, I think it
Speaker 1: would be very difficult not to call it early in
Speaker 1: a presidential race, but generally we have tried not to
Speaker 1: do that. And would people ever, I mean trying to
Speaker 1: think about the different rule that the kinds of computers
Speaker 1: that are available now to newsrooms would have. You know
Speaker 1: that first UNIVAC is this clunky thing, and as you say,
Speaker 1: you know, CBS didn't even believe it's prediction, didn't report
Speaker 1: on it initially. But you could know pretty early in
Speaker 1: a day on election day how things are looking because
Speaker 1: of computational models that your computer would be able to
Speaker 1: kind of five thirty eight. Uh, you know, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of the magical work of computer modeling that
Speaker 1: could be done early on. Does that influence do you
Speaker 1: think how how the coverage unfolds over the course of
Speaker 1: the day. Oh? Absolutely, And and a lot of times,
Speaker 1: you know, early on we'll go in and we'll get
Speaker 1: our pulsers will tell us like it's CBS, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it looks like, you know, somebody's going to carry Virginia.
Speaker 1: It looks like somebody's gonna you know, but we're not
Speaker 1: going to call that, and so we will the closest
Speaker 1: will come to that, as we'll say, you know, it's
Speaker 1: leaning or something like that. But we we simply don't
Speaker 1: don't call any of those early poll closing results until
Speaker 1: the polls in that in that section have actually closed.
Speaker 1: But the other thing, Jill is the polls are just
Speaker 1: not as reliable as they once were, even even the
Speaker 1: EGXIT polling, where people now tend to sometimes not till
Speaker 1: the polsters. And what exit polling is is we just
Speaker 1: hire people to go out and stand outside the polls
Speaker 1: and ask people how they voted. Well, some years back,
Speaker 1: when that first happened, people were happy to do it,
Speaker 1: and but now they sometimes lie to the people, they
Speaker 1: don't tell the truth, or they just simply won't won't
Speaker 1: talk to them because they're such well, we're in such
Speaker 1: a partisan like atmosphere right now. I mean, what computers
Speaker 1: are doing on election day for a newsroom is making
Speaker 1: more information available more quickly and detecting patterns that would
Speaker 1: be hard for people working with pen and paper to detect.
Speaker 1: So at some level, what we're talking about is better
Speaker 1: evidence and more data and better information and more astute analysis.
Speaker 1: And we will intuitively think, well, better evidence, more information,
Speaker 1: more student analysis, even kind of bracketing for a question
Speaker 1: the unreliability of polling data, but just thinking about other
Speaker 1: forms of data that the computer would have previous. The
Speaker 1: returns from previous previous elections, the kind of kind of
Speaker 1: dog and pony show that you know on CNN when
Speaker 1: they have the hologram and they can make a three
Speaker 1: D interactive electoral map, and we suddenly can look at
Speaker 1: patterns over the last for presidential elections, and we can
Speaker 1: look at these county by county bits of information that
Speaker 1: it is a tremendous amount of evidence that has presented
Speaker 1: to us. And in a demidocracy, we're supposed to be informed.
Speaker 1: Is there a version of the influence of computers on
Speaker 1: election day reporting that is a good story, that is
Speaker 1: about improvements to our specivic participation or our commitment to
Speaker 1: democratic institutions. I think we can both point to all
Speaker 1: the things that are kind of decaying around this. But
Speaker 1: what's the good side. Well, the good side is that
Speaker 1: we still this information is still valuable. But I mean
Speaker 1: it's all part of this new world that we live
Speaker 1: in because we've undergone this this communication revolution that goes
Speaker 1: beyond just computers, I mean, the whole coming of the Internet.
Speaker 1: We are we have more information available to us than
Speaker 1: any people who've ever lived on Earth at any one
Speaker 1: time in the history of the world. But does anyone
Speaker 1: think we're or wiser or are we simply overwhelmed with
Speaker 1: so much information that we can't process it? And my
Speaker 1: feeling is we're overwhelmed. We're still working our way through this,
Speaker 1: we're still trying to figure to figure all this out,
Speaker 1: and it has had an impact on the credibility of
Speaker 1: news organizations, and we find people more it's more difficult
Speaker 1: for people to believe anything now. And so the credibility
Speaker 1: of all news organizations every day of the year, uh
Speaker 1: is not what he wants. Was simply because we're just
Speaker 1: being drowned in more information than we can possibly process.
Speaker 1: And I think I think this is all part of that. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: very that's absolutely the case. But we we I think,
Speaker 1: do tend to still want to believe that datum does
Speaker 1: mean wisdom it. I mean, you're absolutely right, it does
Speaker 1: send to more information. But you know, Martin Luther thought
Speaker 1: the invention of the printing press was going to make
Speaker 1: everything just fine, that once people could read the Bible
Speaker 1: in their own language, that all of the problems and
Speaker 1: controversies they had would all be worked out. But after
Speaker 1: the invention of the printing press, that we had thirty
Speaker 1: years of religious wars. It don't everybody all at once
Speaker 1: began to agree on things. And I think we're I
Speaker 1: think the coming of the Internet is having as profound
Speaker 1: an impact on our culture and Western cultures as the
Speaker 1: invention of the printing press had on the people of
Speaker 1: its day. Yeah, although the inventing the printing press makes
Speaker 1: possible the rise of modern democracy, absolutely, so what does
Speaker 1: the invention of the internet make possible? Confusion? I think
Speaker 1: on the downside's there's no question, and we can get
Speaker 1: more information fast than at any any time in the
Speaker 1: history of the world. But just because we get it
Speaker 1: faster does not necessarily mean that it's going to work
Speaker 1: out all the problems. There are still just this myriad
Speaker 1: problems that have to be resolved. But we're getting there.
Speaker 1: But you know, we just kind of haven't reached equilibrium yet.
Speaker 1: And the coming of the Internet and the use of
Speaker 1: computers on election night is just all part of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was to my husband's a computer scientist at MIT,
Speaker 1: and I was asking him yesterday to give me some
Speaker 1: kind of a rule of thumb about the processing the
Speaker 1: capacity of a computer of the nineteen fifties relative to today.
Speaker 1: And I was sitting, of course with my laptop, you know,
Speaker 1: my Mac in my lap. And he said, well, one
Speaker 1: measure would be you have more memory on your Mac
Speaker 1: sitting right here in this room than all the computer
Speaker 1: storage in the entire world in nineteen sixty. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: in terms of the storage of data, not even being
Speaker 1: connected to the internet. Just what was on my hard drive. So,
Speaker 1: if you were giving the task of coming up with
Speaker 1: a plan for election date, election night coverage for twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: what would be a priority for you, Well, just to
Speaker 1: improve the accuracy and to I think I think the
Speaker 1: secret is it's it's not so much the use of
Speaker 1: the computers, but but the use of polling and finding polling. Uh.
Speaker 1: That polling is not more reliable, it's it's one of
Speaker 1: the things that has not improved. Polling has gotten worse,
Speaker 1: not better. Uh, And we we're seeing that now on
Speaker 1: election night is as much as any other time. And
Speaker 1: finding a way to get polls that were as accurate
Speaker 1: as we used to have when you know, we'd do
Speaker 1: a national poll at CBS and we'd call, you know,
Speaker 1: five thousand people to get fifteen hundred people. Well, now
Speaker 1: we have to call thirty or forty thousand to get
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred people and even so you wonder who are
Speaker 1: the people that you're talking to you when you do
Speaker 1: a poll like that, And I think that's that's where
Speaker 1: the I think that's where the improvement could come. And
Speaker 1: that's the part we have to work on. And it's
Speaker 1: also the reason we have to be extremely careful, I
Speaker 1: mean more careful than we've ever been before we broadcast anything,
Speaker 1: because as you now know, I mean, once information gets out.
Speaker 1: Now you know Mark Twain, what was it he said
Speaker 1: that a like can go around the world while the
Speaker 1: truth is still putting its pants on. And that's where
Speaker 1: we are right now. I mean, what we're going through now,
Speaker 1: and just the reporting of the news is it's not
Speaker 1: the people have always made mistakes. They've always been part
Speaker 1: of some people that are trying to put out all stories.
Speaker 1: But the difference now is how quickly it gets it
Speaker 1: gets to the public. And you know, we all have
Speaker 1: to spend time now just sorting out where did this
Speaker 1: come from? Is it true? How did they know that?
Speaker 1: And that's that's what we've got, that's what we've got
Speaker 1: to work on. But we also have got to be
Speaker 1: very careful in what we report. You know, historians talk
Speaker 1: a lot about this nineteen fifty two CBS election night. Um,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't sound like it's a vivid memory for
Speaker 1: you as a kid. But is it something that within
Speaker 1: CBS people talk about or their stories about that. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean elections and how we cover them. It's always
Speaker 1: it's always a topic the topic around CBS News and
Speaker 1: you know, uh, political conventions, election years. People plan their
Speaker 1: careers around those, those those big events. At least they did.
Speaker 1: They were still doing it in my day when when
Speaker 1: you know, when I was at there covering campaigns and stuff.
Speaker 1: So you're always trying to figure out and what you're
Speaker 1: always trying to figure out is how can you get
Speaker 1: the information before the other guys too, which is what,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the main things that journalism is about.
Speaker 1: And I think sometimes we spent more time thinking about
Speaker 1: how can we get the news first than we did
Speaker 1: about what is the impact of the information we're getting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, one thing we thought in two thousand that
Speaker 1: election night was going to go back to being an
Speaker 1: old fashioned election night. We were going into that election.
Speaker 1: We knew it was going to be very close, Gore
Speaker 1: versus Bush, and I remember on the night before election night.
Speaker 1: I told Ann Rather, I said, we are, and I
Speaker 1: said this on television. I said, We're going to have
Speaker 1: an old fashioned election night. We maybe up all night
Speaker 1: before we know who wins this thing. Well under the
Speaker 1: heading of be careful what you wish for. You know
Speaker 1: what happened. It was December eleventh before we found out
Speaker 1: who or twelfth, I guess it was before we found
Speaker 1: out who who won that election, and it was it was.
Speaker 1: It was one of the worst nights CBS ever had.
Speaker 1: You know. We called Florida for Gore at seven forty
Speaker 1: that night, we recalled it at ten o'clock. Gore conceded,
Speaker 1: then he took it back. Then CBS called Florida for
Speaker 1: Bush at two am, and then we had to take
Speaker 1: that back at four am. So we got we got
Speaker 1: an old fashioned election, all right, But it was something
Speaker 1: none of us had anticipated. But it's one of those
Speaker 1: nights I'll always remember. Yeah, I remember that night too,
Speaker 1: because I think it was one of the few nights
Speaker 1: I went to bed before it was resolved. I don't
Speaker 1: know that there's been another one. The desire somehow to
Speaker 1: have it all settled before you turn out the night
Speaker 1: light is a very strong, very strong one from the
Speaker 1: other side, not being the journalist trying to get the
Speaker 1: news first, but being the listener and the viewer trying
Speaker 1: to find it out so I could just go to bed.
Speaker 1: I'm appreciating the speed in other reasons. Yeah, yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: this election night, don't stay up late, go to bed.
Speaker 1: The counting will take a while. Twenty twenty the Year
Speaker 1: of slow voting. Good luck staying, saying and catching up
Speaker 1: on sleep, and we'll be back in the spring with
Speaker 1: a new season of the Last Archive about the rise
Speaker 1: of doubt, psychological warfare, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, Russian misinformation, fake pandemics,
Speaker 1: and maybe, but I hope not disputed elections. You won't
Speaker 1: believe what we've uncovered. I mean, you should believe it,
Speaker 1: but people don't believe anything anymore. Next season, believe it
Speaker 1: or not. The