With the US presidential race in full swing, elections are top of mind. Journalism professor and author Ira Chinoy was on stage at CHM to share insights from his new book, Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting.
After 24 years as a journalist, including as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, Chinoy returned to academia in 2001. Searching for a dissertation topic, he remembered the skepticism he’d faced when he first began using computers to assist in reporting—now a common practice. He was curious to discover exactly when journalism and computing first came together.
That moment occurred on election night in 1952, when computers forecasted the results of the contest between presidential candidates Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson on television for the first time. Both TV and computers were brand new, and Chinoy explained the significance of that night.
Ira Chinoy explains the context for computer forecasting in the 1952 election.
Chinoy noted that the major news stations had embarrassed themselves in the 1948 election by predicting a landslide for Dewey before Truman emerged as the winner. In 1952, everyone thought the election would be close, but the computers called it very early for Eisenhower. The wary news stations waited until much later in the evening to share the forecasts.
Although that story has been told many times, driven by a PR campaign from Remington Rand, which made the UNIVAC computer that appeared on CBS, Chinoy spent years uncovering the surprising—and more accurate—details.
Chinoy uncovered archival footage of the election night coverage on CBS. In one, journalist Charles Collingwood, explains the machine.
Archival footage of CBS’s election night coverage and the UNIVAC.
In other archival clips, the UNIVAC predicts Eisenhower’s win and famed journalist Eric Sevareid sounds a bit gleeful when the computer seems to be having problems. Another clip notes that the problems were all caused by humans.
Chinoy also reviewed NBC’s election night footage and discovered that they too used a computer forecaster called the "Monrobot." When they opened the top of the machine so that viewers could see its blinking lights pieces of sodder fell on the drive. A young man was tasked with removing the pieces with tweezers before they could ruin the drum.
In one clip, the Monrobot predicts an Eisenhower win, but the commentator makes a plug for the importance of humans by remarking that the computer can’t tell what accounts for some of the things that have happened.
True to his roots in investigative journalism, Chinoy tracked down the Monroe Company, still in existence, and discovered some intriguing papers from the 1950s in their storage room. He found the UNIVAC business plan document that was going up for public auction at Christies. And, he began to wonder how people got their election news prior to 1952.
Ira Chinoy shares historical methods of spreading election results.
As the ingenious ways that people used technology to share election news demonstrate, interest in the results has always been high. But what happens when some people refuse to believe the results as happened in the 2020 election? And what can we do to prevent that from happening in the 2024 election when so many people mistrust news and 70 million Americans live in places where there is no local news?
Chinoy urges us to take our cue from the 1952 election and, like the news stations did then, come up with an out-of-the-box solution for our own time.
Predicting the President | CHM Live, July 23, 2024
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