Feb
10, 2003
ELECTION COVERAGE: Media Consortium Signs Contract to Conduct Exit
Polls
The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - The six news organizations
that disbanded Voter News Service last month signed a contract Feb. 4 with two
veteran polling experts to conduct exit surveys of voters during the 2004
presidential election.
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press
announced they had reached an agreement with Warren Mitofsky of Mitofsky
International and Joseph Lenski of Edison Media Research. Terms of the deal
were not disclosed.
The
new consortium, called the National Elections Pool, has less than a year to
build a system in time for the 2004 presidential primaries.
Exit poll information is used to help project winners in
individual elections and provide information on why people voted the way they
did.
Separately,
the consortium members will rely on the AP for counting the vote on election
nights, said Linda Mason, vice president of public affairs for CBS. VNS had its
own vote-counting operation.
The
media organizations disbanded VNS following two major failures in two years.
VNS provided flawed information that led television networks to prematurely
call the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush and was unable to
provide exit poll data during last November's off-year election.
Mason said the news organizations decided to join together to
start the National Elections Pool instead of developing their own systems
because of the expense. The same financial concerns had led the news
organizations to form VNS a decade ago.
Mitofsky and Lenski have spent many years in the business. Mitofsky
pioneered a sample precinct polling system while working with CBS and ran a
predecessor of VNS. Lenski worked for him before
starting his own firm. Mitofsky built a limited exit polling operation for CNN
during the 2002 election.
"We're
looking forward to working with Edison Media Research and Mitofsky
International," said David Tomlin, assistant to the president of AP.
"All of us have our work cut out for us, because the start of the primary
season is less than a year away.
"But
we're confident that they have the capabilities and experience to help us
produce fast, insightful coverage of next year's elections," he said.
While there might have been other options for building a new
exit polling system, the former members of VNS "felt that this was a bird
in the hand," Mason said. +++++
AP-ES-02-10-03
1552EST
This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA7ETNW0CD.html
