Twenty years ago this week, I begged my bosses to stop the presses so we could avoid reporting a huge story that wasn’t true: that Texas Gov. George W. Bush had won Florida, and the presidency.
It was election night — specifically, the early morning hours of the next day — in November 2000. I was covering the media’s serial missteps for The Baltimore Sun and realized The Sun was about to be caught up in it all. In the newsroom, I fought through throngs of colleagues who were mapping out the front page to warn Managing Editor Tony Barbieri: You don’t know. You can’t know.
Under duress to publish, Barbieri nonetheless paused to confer with Washington Bureau Chief Paul West. He soon called down to the presses, which had started to print front pages bearing a headline affirming Bush’s win. It would have been “the kind of mistake that can follow you to the grave in journalism,” West recalled Tuesday morning. “And so, by stopping them and telling them that it wasn’t over there yet, we actually did our jobs.”
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