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Morning News

Columbia University Professor Discusses Congressional Hearings Into Media Practices in Last Election

Aired February 14, 2001 - 10:03 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Keeping a close eye as well on another hearing taking place today on Capitol Hill, one that calls onto the carpet the chief executives of the nation's top news networks. At the top of the next hour, a House committee is due to grill them on the embarrassing miscalls made during the Florida presidential election.

And our Kate Snow is joining us with a preview of that from the House side.

KATE SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Daryn, the networks have already in some ways addressed some of these issue. All five of the networks have now done reports, independent reports. Some of them were internal, one of them was an external report -- that was CNN's own report, which was commissioned by CNN, it was done by three outside experts.

Joining me now is one of those experts who worked on that report, Joan Konner with Columbia University, a former television producer.

You were asked by CNN to look at what happened on election night. Let's start with that. What did you find? What mistakes were made?

PROFESSOR JOAN KONNER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: There were three main points. One was the overall concept of receiving information from a single source, that is VNS, as a collaborative effort of the...

SNOW: Voter News Service.

KONNER: Voter News Service -- as a collaborative effort of all the networks. That violates journalism 101, where you look for at least two sources on information that can be debatable, controversial, about which could be discussion.

Number two, the speed and competition under which the decisions were made.

And number three, a very important point, is to look into the entire process of polling. Polls are presented as though -- well they say 3 percent margin of error. But polls have a lot of problems today. Exit polls keep precincts, and these are statistics on which projections or calls are made, and statistics are not facts.

KAGAN: What have you told CNN and what would you recommend to the other networks that they do to make the system better for the next time?

KONNER: We had several recommendations. At the core of it is slow up. Slow up. Examine Voter News Service, examine polls, commission an outside research organization to do other polls, and also, don't use exit polls for projections, don't use key precincts for projections; count the votes. The public, it appears, is willing to wait. They want real results.

SNOW: You'll be presenting some of these findings at the hearing -- starts at 11:00 this morning?

KONNER: Yes.

SNOW: And thank you for joining us for a little bit of a preview. Joan Konner with the Columbia University school of journalism, who was part of the commission report by CNN.

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