This is NPR's on the media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce relived

election night this week. Among the highlights of that hearing, Dan Rather's greatest hits.

Photostatic, underlined in red, press it in the book, put it in an album, hang it on the wall.

George Bush is the next president of the United States.

No wonder they were yucking it up in the hearing room.

Within two hours of Dan's pledge, CBS and four other networks had to spit it out,

tear it up, erase the underline, remove it from the book,

and take it off the wall as Al Gore unconceited the race.

The networks have been doing internal reviews ever since. The findings of those reviews?

They screwed up. They screwed up because of bad data, because of misreading the bad data,

and because everyone was so scared of being scooped by everyone else.

On the other hand, the network said no one would be that upset if it hadn't been an extremely close election. In other words, it only mattered because people were paying attention. Bob, you've been following this story, right?

Yeah, I guess, but not nearly as closely as Andrew Tyndall has been following this story. He publishes the Tyndall report, a newsletter that

analyzes network news and breaks down coverage into various statistical categories. In that capacity,

Mr. Tyndall has watched every single evening newscast of the Big Three broadcast networks since

1988, including, of course, election night. His first observation is that no matter

how egregious the network's errors, Congress needn't have gotten involved. The networks made a mistake.

They admitted they made a mistake. It didn't seem to be any business of the Congress,

whether they made a mistake or not. Fox News, President Roger Ailes, didn't go that far, but he did object to being interrogated

by an investigative committee versus a legislative fact-finding one, and the swearing-in formality

that went with it.

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