0:15

Pushkin. There's

0:19

a place in our world where the paper

0:21

ballots go, a

0:24

ballot box somewhere,

0:27

I hope. Welcome

0:30

to the Last Archive Special Election

0:32

Edition. I'm Jill Lapour. How

0:35

will we know the results of the twenty twenty election?

0:37

And when? Last

0:40

year? On the Last Archive we did a whole episode about

0:42

the prediction of election results and how all

0:44

that changed in nineteen fifty two. Turn

0:48

back the hands of your clock and go listen

0:50

to that episode. It's the fifth one Project

0:53

X. When I

0:55

was reporting it, I telephoned the wonderful, delightful

0:57

Bob Schieffer to ask him about calling

0:59

elections on election night. Schieffer,

1:02

who's now retired, was for a very long

1:04

time the host of CBS's Face the Nation.

1:07

The interview didn't really fit in the episode, but

1:09

it's haunted me ever since this

1:11

election season. Twitter's announced that

1:14

it's going to slow the flow of information not

1:17

so fast people keep saying about this year's

1:19

voting, So one question

1:21

keep snagging me. How

1:23

did we get so caught up in a fetish for speed in the

1:25

first place. Honestly,

1:28

what's the hurry?

1:35

My daughter just always

1:37

asked me to see, Dad, did you want to be a TV reporter

1:40

when you were a little boy, and they didn't have TV

1:42

when I was a little boy, come

1:44

to Fort Worth until the eighth grade, and

1:47

I remember very well we

1:50

were going out to eat one night

1:52

and we had this Mashican restaurant we always

1:54

went to, and we got out. There was an appliance

1:57

store next door to the

1:59

restaurant and we there

2:01

was a little TV in the window and

2:04

they had it on and I remember that's

2:06

the first time I've ever seen TV and

2:08

I was just mesmerized by it. My dad

2:10

said, come on, I'm hungry, I don't have time

2:12

to watch. So that

2:15

was my introduction to television. Wow.

2:17

And did your family watch the news when you then,

2:20

like when you're in high school? Oh?

2:22

Absolutely. We always watched the news,

2:25

and for some reason, and

2:27

I don't really know why, I guess we

2:30

watched CBS, although the local

2:34

affiliate, and Fort Worth was an NBC

2:36

station. But my mother

2:39

once Walter Cronkite came along

2:41

and all of that, she

2:43

really liked Walter and so we

2:45

kind of we kind of grew up with Hunley and Brinkley

2:48

and Walter Cronkite. Yeah, yeah,

2:50

you know, I had forgotten I went was watching

2:52

the nineteen fifty two coverage. So it's

2:55

Cronkite and Morrow and then Charles

2:57

Collingwood. I had forgotten how

3:00

kind of dashing and debonair Cronkite

3:03

was in the fifties. Yeah, Willie. And he had a

3:05

mustache, which not many people on

3:07

television journal his hand in those

3:10

days. But he was he was very

3:12

urbane, you know, and he had he'd

3:14

been to World War Two and uh,

3:17

you know, he had been you know, foreign correspondent,

3:19

and so he'd

3:22

been around by that time. And

3:25

a lot of people said that, you know, if

3:27

Walter walked into a television

3:29

station today, I'm applied for a job, he

3:31

wouldn't get hired because he didn't look like a

3:33

reporter. But

3:37

he and he had that you know, that cadence

3:39

in his voice, the soul correspondent

3:42

and uh, you know, and nobody

3:45

talks like that anyway, but Walter

3:47

really did talk like that, and he talked

3:49

like that off camera as well as uh

3:52

one camera. Yeah. Well, so

3:55

trying to grapple here what the consequences

3:58

are of the kind of explosion

4:00

of information available to news

4:03

broadcasters and reporters around

4:05

elections that really, you know, this

4:07

is kind of watershed moment in fifty two when

4:10

CBS decides to try

4:12

to predict the election the very night using

4:16

the returns as they're coming in that can be calculated

4:18

with a Unix. CBS announced that they

4:20

would be giving the fastest election

4:23

prediction ever given, and that they would

4:25

call the election before anyone else could call

4:27

it, because I'm fifty two. The worry was

4:29

like they would if they made a prediction, it would

4:31

be wrong. But if they didn't make a prediction, no

4:33

one would watch. And so they bring in

4:36

this machine to grant legitimacy to

4:38

their prediction, but then

4:40

maybe they lead us into a different

4:42

kind of political trouble. So

4:45

I would just love to hear your vantage about

4:47

what it means to bring in computer

4:50

and what we would now call, you know, big data

4:53

into the newsroom on an election night. You

4:56

know it's CBS. When we would talk about

4:58

those early days, the thing that always

5:00

surprised us is they

5:02

brought in this computer and then

5:04

when they got the results from the computer,

5:07

they didn't believe it. They i didn't

5:09

know if it was true or not, and

5:11

they were hesitant about reporting it. They

5:14

held the information for a while, but

5:17

the coming of the computers changed

5:20

everything about election night. I mean,

5:22

in our romantic rear view

5:24

mirror, we look back and think about election

5:27

nights when the family gathered

5:29

around the radio and you know, they

5:31

put on an extra cup of coffee and then

5:33

they waited and waited for the returns

5:35

to come in, and it was a

5:37

lot of fun and in a funny

5:40

kind of way. Among other things. The

5:42

computers sort of took the fun out

5:44

of election night and changed it completely.

5:47

I mean, you think back to you

5:49

know, back when Woodrow Wilson in

5:52

nineteen sixteen he

5:55

went to bed thinking he had lost the presidency,

5:58

and it was not till four days later that he

6:00

found out that he had won. And

6:03

down through the years that began, you know, to

6:05

speed up a little bit. But with the

6:07

coming of computers, it really

6:10

changed everything. And some people

6:13

thought that was very unfair. They didn't

6:15

like the idea they were going to find out in an hour

6:17

or so who won the election. But in

6:20

some cases that was that was exactly

6:22

what happened. And so when you had

6:24

those conversations, did anyone, I

6:26

mean, aside from sort of looking backward with a little

6:29

bit of wistfulness, did anybody

6:31

ever say well, here's here's the way we shouldn't be

6:33

using them. Or were you at the table

6:35

for some of those conversations over the years, you

6:37

know, from the from

6:40

the coming of the computers, from the coming

6:42

of all technological uh

6:44

advanced You know, the one thing about

6:47

communications that is constant

6:49

is it's always changing, and

6:52

as we have seen over the years, it

6:54

always gets faster. And the use

6:56

of computers is like we always

6:59

do with new technology.

7:01

And that goes all the way back to

7:05

the invention of the machine gun, and you

7:07

think about how many people died

7:09

before the general's understood that the way

7:12

to attack a machine gun is not to

7:15

march your troops head on into machine

7:17

gun fire. You kind of go around to the side

7:19

and just like now we're we're

7:22

grappling with what to do with digital

7:24

and all of that, and you

7:26

know, we thought this was going to end

7:28

all the problems and just make things

7:31

faster, but we didn't understand

7:33

the downside of these

7:35

new technological advances.

7:40

You think Facebook knew what the downside

7:42

of what Zuckerberg

7:44

had, you know, put on the

7:47

market there. I'm sure he didn't, nor did anyone

7:50

else, but we always in its

7:52

understandable well we always use

7:54

technology before we completely understand

7:57

it, and that was absolutely the case with

7:59

the coming computers to election night.

8:02

So what are the aside

8:05

from taking the fun

8:07

out of election night, what

8:09

are the other consequences do you think for

8:11

coverage or for how the elections

8:14

themselves go. Well, the

8:16

computers do make mistakes, and I

8:18

mean the technology is sometimes

8:20

wrong. I mean, and

8:23

what I always think about on election night.

8:26

The first thing when people talk about

8:28

computers and things like that is

8:30

in nineteen eighty NBC

8:33

called Ronald Reagan the winner at eight

8:35

fifteen on election

8:38

night. It was such a huge

8:40

landslide over Jimmy Carter and

8:42

Carter formally conceded

8:45

at ten o'clock before the

8:47

polls had even closed in the West,

8:50

and Democrats were absolutely

8:52

furious. Two Democrats,

8:55

al Oleman and James Corman

8:57

publicly blamed Carter for their

9:00

defeats out

9:02

there. Whether that was the

9:04

cause or not, they actually said

9:06

it was his fault. Senator

9:08

Warren Magnusson was also defeated

9:12

because all these many

9:15

races in the Western time zone had

9:17

been affected by Carter's concession.

9:21

House Speaker Tip O'Neill was

9:23

so furious he exploded in

9:25

a conversation with a Carter aid

9:27

telling him you jerks came

9:29

in like a bunch of jerks and you're going

9:32

out the same way. He was just absolutely

9:34

furious, and Washington State

9:37

Congressman Tom Foley said it was vintage

9:39

Carter at his dead worst.

9:44

And you know

9:46

that, we began to think about

9:48

then we'll wait a minute here. We've got the ability

9:50

to do this. And the landslide

9:54

was so overwhelming that

9:56

was there just wasn't much question

9:59

about whether it was right or not. It was

10:02

right, but the

10:05

impact was something that nobody had really

10:07

thought very much about until that time.

10:10

And would that happen now? I mean, would people call a

10:12

national election before the local contests

10:15

had been decided? Well?

10:18

I think it would depend. We instituted

10:20

rules somewhere back that we never

10:23

called a state until

10:25

the polls had had closed in

10:28

that state. If

10:30

you had a situation, where

10:33

would you call it before eleven o'clock?

10:35

I think that's an open question. If

10:38

it was a huge and overwhelming

10:40

landslide, I think

10:42

it would be very difficult not to

10:44

call it early in a presidential

10:47

race, but generally we

10:49

have tried not to do that. And would

10:51

people ever, I mean trying

10:55

to think about the different rule that the kinds

10:57

of computers that are available now

10:59

to newsrooms would have. You

11:01

know that first UNIVAC is this clunky

11:04

thing, and as you say, you know, CBS

11:06

didn't even believe it's prediction, didn't report on

11:08

it initially. But you could

11:11

know pretty early in a day on

11:13

election day how

11:15

things are looking because

11:18

of computational models that your computer

11:20

would be able to kind of five thirty eight. Uh,

11:23

you know, I don't know, it's sort of the magical

11:26

work of computer modeling

11:29

that could be done early on. Does that influence

11:31

do you think how how the

11:33

coverage unfolds over the course of the day.

11:36

Oh? Absolutely, And and a lot

11:38

of times, you know, early on

11:42

we'll go in and we'll get our

11:45

pulsers will tell us like it's

11:47

CBS, uh, you know, it looks

11:49

like, you know, somebody's

11:52

going to carry Virginia.

11:55

It looks like somebody's gonna you know, but

11:57

we're not going to call that, and so

11:59

we will the closest

12:01

will come to that, as we'll say, you

12:04

know, it's leaning or something

12:06

like that. But we we simply

12:08

don't don't call any of those early

12:11

poll closing results

12:14

until the polls in that in

12:16

that section have actually closed.

12:19

But the other thing,

12:21

Jill is the polls are just not

12:23

as reliable as they once were, even

12:26

even the EGXIT polling, where people

12:29

now tend to sometimes not till

12:32

the polsters. And what exit polling

12:34

is is we just hire people to go out

12:36

and stand outside the polls

12:39

and ask people how they voted. Well,

12:43

some years back, when that first happened,

12:45

people were happy to do it, and but now

12:47

they sometimes lie to the people, they

12:51

don't tell the truth, or they just simply

12:53

won't won't talk to them

12:56

because they're such well,

12:58

we're in such a partisan like

13:01

atmosphere right now. I

13:03

mean, what computers are doing on

13:06

election day for a newsroom is

13:09

making more information available

13:12

more quickly and detecting

13:14

patterns that would be hard for people

13:17

working with pen and paper to detect.

13:20

So at some level, what

13:23

we're talking about is better evidence and

13:26

more data and better information and

13:28

more astute analysis. And

13:31

we will intuitively think, well, better

13:34

evidence, more information, more student analysis,

13:37

even kind of bracketing for a question the unreliability

13:39

of polling data, but just thinking about

13:41

other forms of data that the computer would have previous.

13:44

The returns from previous previous elections,

13:47

the kind of kind of dog

13:49

and pony show that you know on CNN

13:52

when they have the hologram and they can make

13:54

a three D interactive electoral

13:57

map, and we suddenly can look at patterns

13:59

over the last for presidential elections,

14:01

and we can look at these county by county

14:03

bits of information that it is

14:05

a tremendous amount of evidence that has presented

14:08

to us. And in a demidocracy, we're supposed to be

14:10

informed. Is there a version

14:12

of the influence of computers

14:14

on election day reporting that

14:18

is a good story, that is about improvements

14:21

to our specivic

14:23

participation or our commitment

14:26

to democratic institutions. I

14:28

think we can both point to all the things that are kind

14:30

of decaying around this. But what's the good

14:32

side. Well, the

14:35

good side is that we still

14:39

this information is still valuable.

14:41

But I mean it's all part of this new world

14:44

that we live in because we've undergone this

14:46

this communication

14:49

revolution that goes beyond just

14:51

computers, I mean, the whole coming of

14:53

the Internet. We

14:56

are we have more

14:58

information available to us

15:00

than any people who've ever lived on

15:02

Earth at any one time in

15:05

the history of the world. But does anyone

15:07

think we're or

15:09

wiser or are we simply overwhelmed

15:11

with so much information that we can't process

15:14

it? And my

15:16

feeling is we're overwhelmed. We're

15:18

still working our way through this, we're

15:20

still trying to figure to figure

15:23

all this out, and it has had

15:25

an impact on the

15:27

credibility of news organizations,

15:29

and we find people more

15:33

it's more difficult for people to believe

15:35

anything now. And so the

15:38

credibility of all news organizations

15:42

every day of the year, uh

15:45

is not what he wants. Was simply

15:47

because we're just being drowned in

15:50

more information than we can possibly process.

15:53

And I think I think this is all part

15:55

of that. Yeah, no, very that's

15:58

absolutely the case.

16:00

But we we I think, do

16:03

tend to still want

16:06

to believe that datum does mean wisdom

16:08

it. I mean, you're absolutely right, it

16:11

does send to more information. But you know, Martin

16:13

Luther thought the invention of the printing

16:15

press was going to make everything just fine,

16:18

that once people could read the Bible in

16:20

their own language, that all of the problems

16:23

and controversies they had would all be worked

16:25

out. But after the invention

16:28

of the printing press, that we had thirty years of

16:30

religious wars. It don't everybody

16:33

all at once began to agree

16:37

on things. And I think we're I

16:39

think the coming of the Internet is having

16:41

as profound an impact on our

16:43

culture and Western cultures

16:46

as the invention of the printing press had on

16:49

the people of its day. Yeah,

16:51

although the inventing the printing press makes

16:53

possible the rise of modern democracy, absolutely,

16:56

so what does the invention of the internet make

16:59

possible? Confusion? I

17:03

think on the downside's there's

17:05

no question, and we can get more

17:07

information fast than

17:10

at any any time in

17:12

the history of the world. But just

17:15

because we get it faster does not necessarily

17:18

mean that it's going to work

17:20

out all the problems. There are still just

17:22

this myriad problems that have

17:24

to be resolved. But we're getting there.

17:27

But you know, we just kind

17:29

of haven't reached equilibrium yet. And

17:32

the coming of the Internet and

17:34

the use of computers on election night

17:37

is just all part of that. Yeah.

17:39

I was to my husband's a computer scientist at

17:42

MIT, and I was asking him yesterday to

17:44

give me some kind of a rule of thumb about

17:47

the processing the capacity of a

17:49

computer of the nineteen fifties relative

17:52

to today. And I was sitting, of course with my laptop,

17:55

you know, my Mac in my lap. And he said, well,

17:57

one measure would be you have more

17:59

memory on your Mac sitting

18:02

right here in this room than all the computer

18:04

storage in the entire world in nineteen

18:06

sixty.

18:08

Yeah, just in terms of the storage of data, not even

18:11

being connected to the internet. Just what was on

18:13

my hard drive. So, if

18:15

you were giving the task of

18:17

coming up with a plan for election date,

18:20

election night coverage for

18:22

twenty twenty, what would be

18:24

a priority for you, Well,

18:27

just to improve the accuracy and

18:30

to I think I think the

18:32

secret is it's it's not so much

18:34

the use of the computers, but but the

18:36

use of polling and finding polling.

18:39

Uh. That polling

18:42

is not more reliable, it's it's one

18:44

of the things that has not improved. Polling

18:46

has gotten worse, not better.

18:49

Uh, And we we're seeing that now

18:54

on election night is as much as

18:56

any other time. And finding

18:58

a way to get polls that

19:00

were as accurate as we used

19:02

to have when you know, we'd

19:04

do a national poll at CBS and we'd

19:06

call, you know, five thousand

19:08

people to get fifteen hundred people.

19:11

Well, now we have to call thirty or forty

19:13

thousand to get

19:16

fifteen hundred people and even

19:18

so you wonder who are

19:20

the people that you're talking to you

19:23

when you do a poll like that, And I

19:25

think that's that's where the I

19:28

think that's where the improvement could come. And

19:30

that's the part we have to work on. And it's also

19:32

the reason we have to be extremely

19:35

careful, I mean more careful than

19:37

we've ever been before we broadcast

19:39

anything, because as you now know,

19:41

I mean, once information gets

19:44

out. Now you know Mark

19:46

Twain, what was it he said that a like

19:48

can go around the world while the truth

19:50

is still putting its pants on. And

19:54

that's where we are right now. I mean, what

19:57

we're going through now, and

20:00

just the reporting of the news is

20:03

it's not the people have always made mistakes.

20:05

They've always been part of some people

20:07

that are trying to put out all stories. But

20:10

the difference now is how quickly it

20:13

gets it gets to the public.

20:15

And you know, we all

20:17

have to spend time now just sorting out

20:20

where did this come from? Is it true?

20:22

How did they know that? And that's

20:25

that's what we've got, that's what we've got to

20:27

work on. But we also have got to be very

20:30

careful in what we report. You

20:32

know, historians talk a lot about this nineteen fifty

20:34

two CBS election night. Um,

20:38

and it doesn't sound like it's a vivid memory for you as

20:40

a kid. But is it something that within CBS

20:42

people talk about or their stories about

20:45

that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean elections

20:48

and how we cover them. It's always

20:51

it's always a topic the

20:53

topic around CBS

20:55

News and you know, uh, political

20:59

conventions, election

21:01

years. People plan their careers around

21:04

those, those those big events.

21:06

At least they did. They were

21:08

still doing it in my day when when

21:10

you know, when I was at there covering campaigns

21:13

and stuff. So you're always

21:15

trying to figure out and what you're always trying

21:17

to figure out is how can you get the information

21:19

before the other guys too, which

21:21

is what, you know, one of the main things

21:24

that journalism is about. And

21:26

I think sometimes we spent more time thinking

21:29

about how can we get the news first than we

21:31

did about what is the impact

21:34

of the information we're getting. Yeah.

21:37

You know, one thing we

21:41

thought in two

21:43

thousand that election night

21:46

was going to go back to being an old

21:48

fashioned election night. We

21:50

were going into that election. We knew it was

21:52

going to be very close, Gore

21:55

versus Bush, and I remember

21:57

on the night before election

21:59

night. I told Ann Rather, I said, we

22:02

are, and I said this on television. I said,

22:04

We're going to have an

22:06

old fashioned election night.

22:08

We maybe up all night before

22:10

we know who wins this thing. Well

22:13

under the heading of be

22:15

careful what you wish for. You

22:17

know what happened. It was December eleventh

22:19

before we found out who or twelfth, I

22:21

guess it was before we found out who

22:24

who won that election, and it

22:27

was it was. It was one of the worst

22:29

nights CBS ever

22:31

had. You know. We

22:33

called Florida for Gore at

22:35

seven forty that night,

22:38

we recalled it at ten o'clock.

22:40

Gore conceded, then he

22:42

took it back. Then CBS called

22:45

Florida for Bush at two am,

22:47

and then we had to take that back at four

22:49

am. So we

22:52

got we got an old fashioned election,

22:54

all right, But it was something

22:56

none of us had anticipated.

22:59

But it's one of those nights I'll always

23:01

remember. Yeah,

23:04

I remember that night too, because I

23:06

think it was one of the few nights I went to bed before it

23:08

was resolved. I don't know that there's been another

23:11

one. The desire somehow to have it all

23:13

settled before you turn out the night

23:15

light is a very strong, very strong

23:17

one from the other side, not being

23:19

the journalist trying to get the news first,

23:21

but being the listener and

23:24

the viewer trying to find it out so

23:26

I could just go to bed. I'm appreciating

23:29

the speed in other reasons. Yeah,

23:31

yeah, exactly this

23:34

election night, don't stay up late, go

23:36

to bed. The counting will take a while. Twenty

23:39

twenty the Year of slow voting. Good

23:42

luck staying, saying and catching up on sleep, and

23:44

we'll be back in the spring with a new season

23:46

of the Last Archive about the rise of

23:48

doubt, psychological warfare, hoaxes,

23:51

conspiracy theories, Russian misinformation,

23:54

fake pandemics, and maybe,

23:56

but I hope not disputed elections.

23:59

You won't believe what we've uncovered. I mean,

24:01

you should believe it, but people don't believe anything anymore.

24:04

Next season, believe it

24:07

or not. The