From W.N.Y.C. in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. A voter news service computer breakdown Tuesday forced

broadcast and cable news to suddenly do without exit poll data, a last-minute monkey wrench in

the works for organizations already chastened by the reporting fiasco of Election 2000. Gone were the

detailed breakdowns of voting patterns, demographic segment by segment,

replaced by old-fashioned broad analysis of the voter's will.

Producer at large Mike Peska, who watched the coverage, as always with nearly pathological attention,

was struck both by the exit polling data that the media didn't much need and the earlier

campaign tracking polls that the media didn't much heed. Hi, Mike. Indeed. All right, so Mike,

how was the first election without VNS? It was pretty careful. It was the Heinz ketchup election.

It may take a while, but, you know, when it finally comes out in the end, it'll be worth it.

Yeah, but without the VNS data, did you find yourself wondering if New Hampshire's Latinas, for example, went for Sununu or Shaheen? Did you miss the detail?

No, I didn't. I don't think anyone did. The oldest cliche in politics is when

you're trailing in the polls before an election, you say, you know, there's only one poll that

matters, and that's the poll on election day. And I don't think they mean the VNS poll. I think

they mean when people actually vote. Now, the VNS data is useful for academics, and there's

actually strong reason to think that they'll be able to recover all that data for future studies.

But the networks all promise us news and analysis, and they proved that they were able to take voting trends and from those trends.

Smart people could make good analysis.

This is what Aaron Brown did.

I just think that in close races, one of the things that people thought a lot about tonight is

who supports the president.

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