I tend to be sceptical of conspiracy theories. On election night when the networks were quick to call states for Kerry but waited for hours after 100% of the vite was in to call them for Bush I assumed that they were being cautious after their problems in 2000.

It turns out that the conspiracy theorists were pretty close to the mark. The networks didn't call enough states to give Bush the election because Kerry asked them not to.

The New York Times told the story. At 12:41 a.m., Fox News declared that Ohio was a win for Bush. "Howard Wolfson, a [Kerry] strategist, burst into the 'boiler room' in Washington where the brain trust was huddled and said, 'we have 30 seconds' to stop the other networks from following suit." The Kerry camp dialed furiously and begged the networks to hold any more projections. The Bush camp called to make sure the networks who called Ohio would not backslide based on Kerry lobbying.

From then on, only Fox and the NBC-MSNBC combo had called Ohio, but refused to project victory in any other Bush state, especially ripe and ready Nevada. ABC, CBS, and CNN all pretended Ohio had not been decided, even with nearly 100 percent of precincts reporting. Millions of Americans woke up with a sick feeling: is there a crisis again?

Everyone, perhaps intimidated by the vision of another Michael Moore documentary accusing them of calling victory prematurely, put the science aside and waited for the politicians to make a move. When John Kerry called the White House to concede, suddenly the anchors mysteriously found the secret math in the trash can that would allow them to call Ohio and/or Nevada. This is the very definition of pack journalism: the TV news elite huddled in a mob, politically calculating, wanting less to get the call right than to avoid the wrath of angry liberals stuck on the losing end of the results again.