Despite the big audience for Tuesday night's election coverage, the already bruised image of network news may look even more battered after analysts have their way with it. "A lot of the general public will see this as a black eye for the networks," Rod Gelatt, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, told Bloomberg News Wednesday. "Any time you have to call back a call, it's highly embarrassing," Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) told the online edition of Electronic Media magazine. "I'm sure there will be a lot of tough questions asked about what happened and what went wrong," she added. In an interview with today's (Thursday) Wall Street Journal, Curtis Gans, director of the research group Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, called the networks' coverage "bad journalism" and charged that networks are "racing to come to judgment and giving people inaccurate information." Spokesmen for each of the networks attempted to deflect the criticism, and news producers insisted they had nothing to apologize for. Most blamed Voter News Service, a consortium owned by CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, CNN and the Associated Press to provide exit-poll data, for the screw-up. (VNS declined to discuss the matter.) "We made mistakes," NBC election producer Jeff Zucker told the New York Post. "But we made mistakes in good faith, based on bad information. If you make a mistake and own up to it, that's fine."

Source: Studio Briefing