These professional standards have yielded the now ubiquitous sound bite to convey information. Over the past twenty years, several industry trends set the Election Night chaos in motion. To counter cable news in the seventies and early eighties, the broadcast networks spent and continue to spend millions on star journalists like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Diane Sawyer on the hope that viewer trust in these superstar journalists and others like them will keep people tuning in and enable the networks to sell airtime to advertisers. News changed, too. Gone are the days of Walter Cronkite and the Evening News.
News is always on.
Twenty-four hour news over cable television and live breaking news from remote locations enabled by smaller and lighter equipment both increase the competition to be first with the most riveting news. To economize on polling, the broadcast networks take exit poll data from a single source and make their own predictions based on the sample data. When these industry trends of promoting star journalists and of relying upon a single source for poll data combined with tighter competition to call the race first with the fewest, flashiest words, soundbite journalism collapsed. The existing system could not handle it. Had the election not been so tight, the error in Florida would not have mattered.