Blogs Leak Exit Poll Data Early, Before Mainstream Media

Politically oriented Web logs began posting leaked exit poll data early, influencing media coverage of the race and underscoring the new medium's continued emergence as an opinion-shaper. The willingness of the individuals who run the Internet sites, known as blogs, to post the data as soon as they could obtain them -- by whatever means -- gave them a leg up on the nation's mainstream news organizations, which were bound by their own restrictions on disseminating exit-poll information.