Ending weeks of litigating, political maneuvering, and heated public denunciations of so-called liberal media bias, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately intervened in the election on December 12, 2000, voting 5-4 to bar a recount of the Florida vote and thus effectively anointing Bush president. Despite losing the popular vote to Gore by more than half a million votes, Bush received 271 electoral college votes to Gore's 267, the narrowest margin since 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes, after disputed recounts in four states, beat Samuel J. Tilden by a single electoral vote.

     The evening topped off a campaign that might otherwise have been more memorable for the satirical impersonations of Will Ferrell as Bush and Darrell Hammond as Gore on the popular late-night comedy­ variety show Saturday Night Live. Despite early tem­ pests involving allegedly subliminal Republican campaign ads ("RATS" briefly appeared in one television advertisement for Bush as part of an animated special effect flying the word "DEMOCRATS" into the shot) and an instance when Bush was caught on tape calling New York Times reporter Adam Clymer an obscene term, the election seemed primarily notable for the lackadaisical voter response it generated.

     After November 7, a new iconography for the presidential campaign emerged on television. Dan Rather infamously boasted early in the evening to CBS viewers "if we say somebody's carried the state, you can take that to the bank. Book it!" After the predictions seemed less invincible, NBC political analyst Tim Russert made the low-tech combination of personal whiteboard and red dry erase marker a household image. The cable channel C-SPAN, normally broadcasting hearings and Congressional votes to fulfill its public affairs programming mandate, featured reruns of the Saturday Night Live sketches. The image of wide-eyed Judge Robert Rosenberg inspecting questionable Broward County ballots behind a magnifying glass became a lightning rod for all that was wrong with the voting and recount process in Florida.

     Rather than pursue disturbing, historic, and ongoing irregularities in the voting process, such as the deliberate purging of black voters from Florida's voter rolls, subsequent Congressional hearings focused on television coverage of election night. Billy Tauzin (R-LA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, set the tone of the investigation in the months leading up to the February 14, 200 I, hearings when he accused the networks of harboring "probable bias" in painting "a very disturbing picture," in which television executives wanted the country to believe "that Al Gore was sweeping the country." Hauling the executives of FOX, CBS, CNN, NBC, and the Voter News Service before Congress, Tauzin proceeded to soften his charges of network bias. Network executives, in turn, proceeded to blame Voter News Service as the culprit, and pledged both to take a more active role in VNS's affairs by sitting on its Board of Directors, as well as to overhaul the consortium's data-gathering  procedures to better reflect changes in the electorate, such as accounting for a rise in absentee ballots.

     While the 2000 Presidential Election was in large part marked by how its aftermath played out on television, it also was marked by what was not seen: an encroaching privatization of the public interest, and increasingly sophisticated forms of virtual gerrymandering (or dividing an area into voting districts so as to give an advantage to one party). For example, VNS was symptomatic of the massive downsizing of network news operations beginning in the 1980s. Rather than conduct their own research competitively, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and the Associated Press formed the consortium after the 1992 election to create a monolithic election-day news gathering entity. In February 2000. VNS threatened to sue both the online Slate magazine and National Review Online after their websites published VNS exit poll data. Given that VNS was the sole source for election news, this oligopolistic behavior seemed somewhat at odds with the commitment to the First Amendment normally found among media organizations. After the November 2000 elections, VNS contracted the Battelle Memorial Institute, a defense and CIA contractor. to develop an entirely new computerized system to tabulate election results. However, the $8 million overhaul of VNS's data anal­ysis became overloaded and crashed early during coverage of the Congressional elections on November 5, 2002. By January 2003, the major cable operators and networks had decided to disband their consortium, but not before valuable demographic data of that election had been lost forever.

     Meanwhile, the story of  how  Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Director of Elections Clayton Roberts paid $4 million to DBT, a private company that ended up purging electoral rolls of 22,000 black Democratic voters, has yet to be covered by a single mainstream news media out­let in the United States. The story instead aired in Great Britain as part of the BBC television news­ magazine show Newsnight on February 16, 2001.