Predicting the Winner

Winner of the Ray Hiebert History of Journalism Published Work Award The history of American elections changed profoundly on the night of November 4, 1952. An outside-the-box approach to predicting winners from early returns with new tools—computers—was launched live and untested on the newest medium for news: television. Like exhibits in a freak show, computers were referred to as “electronic brains” and “mechanical monsters.” Yet this innovation would help fuel an obsession with numbers a