At 2:16 a.m., Fox News Channel declared Bush the winner in Florida. Within four minutes, NBC, CBS, CNN and ABC did the same. The AP said the race was still too close to name a winner.

Fox made the call based on its analysis of the vote count – it believed Bush's lead was so large there was no way Gore could overcome it given what experts knew about ballots left uncounted, said John Moody, Fox News Channel's vice president of news and editorial quality.

He said Fox did not make its call based on any advice from VNS. In fact, because of the earlier mistake on Gore, "we were all aware that their model was not perfect," he said.

Why were the other networks so quick to follow?

"It's competitive," pollster John Zogby said on Fox News Channel. "One network does it and it creates a panic among the other networks."