Having misread a contest that took stunningly unpredicted turns, some network officials conceded yesterday they had committed critical blunders Tuesday night and early yesterday, errors that compelled a presidential candidate to mistakenly concede the election and prompted some networks to re-examine how they predict winners.
The network executives, acknowledging that they had been off base twice in declaring a victor in Florida, said they were examining how the errors could have occurred. The mistakes were characterized by many in academia, politics and the news media as perhaps the most egregious election-night gaffes in the modern television era.
ABC News was one of the networks that was looking into its election-night coverage. Kerry Marash, vice president of editorial quality for the network, said: ''We're having a very intensive post-mortem that includes a top-to-bottom review. The first thing we have to do is determine what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.''
