When did it become all right to broadcast misinformation to the country

Source of graph: FiveThirtyEight.com

We watched the election coverage last night, switching from channel to channel. The networks refused to project the state results until the state polls had closed. They refused to project the national result of the presidential election until they had state projections for Obama wins that totaled more than the 270 electoral votes needed to carry the electoral college. It was suggested (repeatedly) that this policy was in place to keep from biasing the elections. I don't know what the evidence is that the networks could change the outcomes of the election by calling it early. I strongly suspect that if they called the results of the election at 6:00 pm EST no one would watch, and I suspect that they would prefer to have a large audience to justify selling lots of advertizing.

Many of the networks were interviewing spokespersons for the Republicans and Democrats during the evening. The Republicans continued to express optimism that their candidate would win until the networks called the election for Obama. It was stated that they did so to keep the spirits high of their supporters in the Western states, in order to benefit as many of the Congressional and local candidates of their party in those states as possible.

The graph above, from Nate Silver's and Sean Quinn's great blog shows a clear indication of a win for Obama, and was available before election day. Silver and Quinn use a sophisticated process to project the outcome of the election, based on the results of large numbers of publicly available survey results. Its predictions proved quite accurate, as one expects that they should have. Of course, they could have been in error, but the results were worth basing your election bets upon.

The most accurate coverage for the networks would have been to announce early on that it was very likely for Obama to win, and win significantly. The most accurate way for an anchor to deal with a Republican claim that the election was still in play would have been to challenge them hard and demand evidence for their untenable assertions. Instead of presenting a clear statement of the most probable outcome at each time during the evening, the network news apparently allowed disinformation to be broadcast and dissimulate their own conclusions.

I don't think that the networks fooled many people. But when did it become OK for them to broadcast in this way and call it "news"?

Does it make a difference? I suppose it does, in that that kind of coverage would make it much harder to get the public concerned when, as might happen with election fraud, the reported results don't match the projected outcome. In any case, it is a slippery slope when the news agencies decide it is OK to broadcast something different than what they believe to be most probably true.