The Media Is Wrong!  Long Live the Media!
			By Howard Megdal
	Opinion
	Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA) has called for Congressional hearings to determine what, exactly, we can do about the terrible network predictions, which taint the electoral process, keep voters from the polls, and ruin democracy as we know it.
	There are two important lessons here: one we learn from the exit polls through the years, and the other from the Florida debacle.
	What Representative Tauzin, and many other Americans, should understand is this: the exit polling used by networks to call races is incredibly scientific.  In fact, in all other presidential elections using the VNS (Voter News Service), Election Day exit polls to predict the winners, they had never been wrong.  That is 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, right every time since 1984.  They have also been astonishingly accurate in Senate and House races.  In fact, only once in CNN's history prior to this election have they been forced to take back a "call" (1998's Kentucky Senate race call), and when all was said and done, it was accurate after all.  These methods will only be fouled up by statistical error, which is what happened.  The margin was not so close as to render exit polling meaningless; the pollster simply erred.  Under no circumstances would the actual exit polling have resulted in a call.
	Of course, the lesson to learn from this election is: take these calls with a grain of salt.  Don't get decimated if networks say your candidate has lost, but it looks too close to call.  Certainly, if you are the candidate, don't concede based on network projections.  After all, you may just have to call and retract.  But if you believe your candidate still has a shot, but the networks have made a call, you are most likely kidding yourself.
				By Caroline Morgan
	Opinion
	Before we get annoyed at the current presidential mess, let's take a good look at how we got here.  We live in an impatient culture--one where people actually eat TV dinners on a voluntary basis.  We don't want to wait for anything, and, in that spirit, our TV stations found a way to hurry up the election for us so that we would know who "won" before bedtime on Election Day.  Thank god.
	The fact is, being on television doesn't equip people to interpret numbers any better than the rest of us.  There's no real reason why, if they gave us the vote totals and the percent reporting, we couldn't reach the same conclusion as the networks.  The only reason they call the election is because we have given them the power to do so...and then we believe them.
	That said, let's take another look at Florida.  We've all heard (The Outside World reported it, in fact) about pro-Nader groups telling voters to wait until the election was safely called in their state, then vote for Nader.  Well, on Election Day, all the networks called Florida for Gore while some polls were still open in the state.  How many people do you think went off happily to vote for Nader--and plunged us into this incomprehensible legal nightmare?  Forget blaming Nader: the networks may have cost Gore the presidency this year.  Once is enough.  What better argument for asking them to keep their opinions to themselves and letting each voter reach an individual conclusion?  It takes a little more time, but it might be worth it.
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