An inconvenient fact-check of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth on its 20th anniversary

The night and early morning of Nov. 7 and 8, 2000, is one that serves as a true inflection point for the United States. The time was around 7:50 p.m. Eastern, and all the major networks called Florida for Vice President Al Gore, effectively handing him the election with 272 electoral votes. But there was one problem: In the quest to get it first instead of getting it right, the networks had called the race before polls closed on Florida’s deep-red panhandle, which is largely located in the Central time zone. It was an error that marked a preview of what legacy media would become in the 21st century: unreliable and lazy.  Here’s how on the latter: From 6:30 p.m. to 7:50 p.m. Eastern, 13 broadcast journalists reported a total of 39 times that all polls closed in the entire state of Florida at 7 pm across multiple national networks. How not one reporter, editor, producer, or executive was aware that Florida had two time zones is one of the most unintentional comedic moments in the industr…



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