On election night, news anchors repeated words like "caution" and "too close to call" with the neutrally pleasant expression parents don when telling their children some, but not all of, the facts of life.

On CBS, where Dan Rather proudly told viewers that "I would rather be last than wrong," the most telling illustration on the electronic map was a big white splotch known as "insufficient data."

All of the networks strained so hard to avoid repeating the early and flawed projections of 2000 that it was almost painful. Even though blogs and other Web sites on the Internet carried early exit poll results, the networks steered clear of even mentioning them. It was the wise, responsible thing to do, (quite literally, politically correct), but it left the anchors without much to say.

Like Kremlinologists studying the Politburo line-up at the Soviet May Day parade, viewers mostly had to squint and interpret clashing images of a tired President Bush returning to the White House lawn and an ebullient John Kerry feasting on chowder and clams at the Union Oyster House in Boston, and later, around 9:30, the president inviting television cameras into his residence to capture him surrounded by friends and family, with no corresponding sign of hospitality by his Democratic opponent.

Fox News commentators cheered up after the president made his cameo appearance, but earlier they were quick to rush to conclusions, looking stunned and somber as they hinted that early exit polls showed Kerry doing better than expected. "I've spent all day telling Republican friends of mine that exit polls are usually right," Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, told Brit Hume just before 9 p.m. "If the polls look bad, don't kid yourself."

At that moment on ABC, Peter Jennings was reeling off a list of states and repeating, over and over as if taking the Fifth Amendment, "We are not prepared to make a projection."

Network caution was mocked on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." When Stewart asked political analyst Stephen Colbert for his prediction, Colbert demurred. "I'm waiting for every vote to be counted, recounted, notarized and personally embossed."

And the less networks could say, the showier their election night sets. CNN rented the Nasdaq site in Times Square. NBC outdid the competition by calling its flamboyant tent city of sky booths and control rooms outside Rockefeller Center "Democracy Plaza." an Orwellian name that conjured Moscow's Chausse Entuziastov (Highway of the Enthusiastic).