WAUGH ON THE MEDIA : Get it first, then get it right.

I started watching the returns early election night. Consequently, I heard Dan Rather, CBS's king of cornpone, begin the evening with his now infamous promise. Speaking in his usual oleaginous fashion, Rather told us that CBS might not be the first network to call a particular state or race, but that being first wasn't the most important thing. "If we say somebody's carried the state, you can take that to the bank. Book it!" he proclaimed.

The rest, as they say, is history--or is it comedy? Shortly before 8 p.m., the networks, including CBS, stampeded to call Florida for Gore. By 10 they had all retracted that prediction, judging the race too close to call. After the evening's initial blunder, you would think that all caution would be exercised before a final Florida winner was announced. But if you thought that, you don't know the news biz. Shortly after 2 a.m., Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch's answer to "liberal media bias," declared Florida for George W. Bush and Bush as the next president. Lemming-like, the other networks quickly followed. "Unless there is a terrible calamity," ABC's Peter Jennings said, "George W. Bush, by our projections, is going to be the next president."

Calamity did not tarry. Al Gore, who like most Americans believes what he sees on the TV news, called Bush and conceded. As we all know, Gore was on his way to deliver his concession speech when Democratic operatives monitoring the returns alerted him to the inconclusive vote tally. By 4 a.m. the networks shamefacedly admitted they had gotten Florida wrong again.

The hallucinatory quality of this media debacle gets even better. It is now known that the Fox News consultant who called Florida for Bush was a man named John Ellis. Ellis is George W. Bush's cousin. "I am loyal to my cousin," Ellis is widely quoted as saying. "I put that loyalty ahead of my loyalty to anyone else."

Explanations from the networks of what went wrong sound like something straight out of "Saturday Night Live." "The call of Florida for Gore was not a mistake; it was a miscalculation," Fox News vice president John Moody told Time. "The call for Bush was not a miscalculation, it was a mistake. We did it without being sure."

Competition among the networks is ferocious, and the way in which competition distorts the news has never been more apparent. Despite Rather's assurances, the clear goal of all the networks is to be the first to announce the winner of the presidential race. Yes, the system of exit polling used for predicting winners has worked well in the past. But the enormous pressure to call a tight presidential election revealed just how fallible the media have always been.

That mistake-prone dynamic pervaded the ongoing coverage of the contested Florida vote as well. Despite all the hand wringing about election-night errors, the pattern of reckless reporting continued. When the U.S. Supreme Court instructed the Florida Supreme Court to clarify its ruling allowing recounts, initial TV and Internet reports of what the high court had done were wildly contradictory and inaccurate. The indefatigable Dan Rather broke into regular programming to announce, "The United States Supreme Court has struck down the Florida Supreme Court ruling in favor of Vice President Gore. It's a Bush win." Wrong. NBC and the Associated Press also got it wrong.

Clearly, the round-the-clock TV news format thrives on perpetuating crisis and a stark winner/loser storyline, either real or imagined. Consequently, we were subjected to violent swings in the tenor of the coverage, with each step in the legal process seeming to spell doom for one candidate or the other. The rush to get on the air with only half-digested news and to keep the public in a kind of frenzy over each candidate's prospects now seems a wholly illusory exercise.

Given the time pressures of TV and daily journalism, mistakes are inevitable. Still, how the big-time media performed in the last two months is more than sobering. In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh drew a bitingly satirical picture of the venality, confusion, and often sheer chaos that characterize the news business. Waugh was deeply suspicious of the powerful media of his day and what he thought was their frail grasp of reality and their eagerness to manipulate public opinion. Published in 1938, Scoop describes the adventures of William Boot, a hilariously inept foreign correspondent for London's Daily Beast. Boot, a nature writer, is mistakenly sent to cover a civil war in the obscure African country of Ishmaelia (somewhere near Chad, we imagine). The mass media, Waugh shows, are much more interested in keeping an eye on each other than on the story they're suppose to be covering. A whole host of John Ellis-like characters keep popping up in the most unlikely places, while a frenzy of mindless competition among the journalists generates one absurdly false story after another.

"'But it's going to be a tough assignment from what I hear,'" Corker, a news-agency correspondent, tells Waugh's inexperienced hero. "'Cutthroat competition. That's where I envy you--working for a paper. You only have to worry about getting your story in on time for the first edition. We have to race each other all day.'

"'But the papers can't use your reports any earlier than ours.'

"'No, but they use the one that comes in first.'

"'But if it's exactly the same as the one that came in second and third and fourth and they are all in time for the same edition...?'

"Corker looked at him sadly. 'You know, you've got a lot to learn about journalism.'"

Sometimes the news from Florida sounded uncannily like news from Ishmaelia.