From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

When election night coverage began Tuesday, there may have been some uncertainty about the presidency.

But on television, one thing was sure.

While voting places and a given state remained open, prognostication took a holiday. This time around, we have made a decision that we'll wait for every single precinct to shut down in the state before we go ahead and project any winners.

We don't have Georgia on our minds, like the Great Ray Charles said, we got Florida on our minds, 2000.

Ah, yes, the debacle of 2000 and the premature call of Florida and the presidency decisively to Al Gore.

The abuse of exit poll analysis was appalling, like watching a junkie OD, and about a surprising.

Of course TV networks surrendered to the vanity of revealing their special, special knowledge.

Of course, they succumbed to the competitive pressure to be first calling a key state.

Of course they couldn't bear the frustration of holding back actual data

while desperate anchors and pundit blowhards vamp for their lives.

But after election 2000, the watchword was

restraint. This time all the networks wanted us to know, I swear, man, I'm off the junk. And this time

I mean it. We don't even have a result in New Hampshire yet, much less do we have results in the

Midwest yet. It's not incompetence on

anybody's part, it's caution. Yet through the early coverage, there was this strange sense

emerging that the people on TV knew something really important that they just couldn't say aloud,

at least not directly. There is a quiet confidence here among the Kerry staff. They're not hysterical,

but there's a quiet confidence that he is going to pull this thing out. An easy observation to make

when you and the Kerry campaign have seen the exit poll figures indicating Carrie has cleaned

...