Edition: U.S. / Global

COUNTING THE VOTE: THE MEDIA; For TV, a Story With Everything

Published: November 19, 2000

No sooner had Lester Holt, an anchor for MSNBC, begun to study the script that had been slapped into his palm than a voice in his ear from the control room told him to chuck it.

The Florida election story was changing so rapidly -- this change concerned a federal court's decision not to intervene to stop the manual recounting -- that the news readers and writers of NBC's all-news cable network, headquartered in a cavernous complex here, were being forced to make and remake their newscasts before viewers' eyes.

''I'll have to ad-lib,'' Mr. Holt said matter-of-factly, standing just off camera and waiting for his cue to go on tonight at just after 6 p.m. Two hours earlier, Mr. Holt had breathlessly relayed to viewers a network scoop in an even more critical decision, the State Supreme Court ruling that barred the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, from declaring the Florida vote final on Saturday.

''It's so cool,'' the anchor said. ''We've thrown away all the usual trappings. This is a true breaking story, and it's just raw reporting.''

As snowflakes are to Aspen, so is the Florida recount to MSNBC. The network and its rivals, CNN and the Fox News Channel, live to cover stories that can galvanize the nation, stories like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Columbine shootings and the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Diana, Princess of Wales.

But the suspended political animation into which the election has thrown the country is in another category entirely for the networks. Not only is it vastly expanding viewership -- MSNBC's coverage on Election Day and the two days following were the highest-rated days in its four years on the air -- but it is also a story anchors and reporters say they do not have to apologize about. To the joy of serious broadcast journalists everywhere, there is not the faintest whiff of the tabloid about it.

''It's clean, aggressive, Machiavellian politics,'' Chris Matthews, host of the network's political round-table program, ''Hardball,'' said after he finished yet another hour of on-air give-and-take with the likes of the pollster Patrick Caddell and the columnist Mike Barnicle. ''There is no illegality, no dirty tricks. This is inside politics, outside.''

Viewers tend to turn to all-news cable channels in large numbers only when a story warrants their attention, so networks like MSNBC are doing all they can to milk the moment. In a banner that runs across the bottom of the MSNBC screen most of the time, the words ''Breaking News'' appear in big letters, even at the intermittent moments when the news has ceased to break.

The network has cleared the decks for the Florida story. With its over-the-airwaves flagship, NBC, it has blanketed the state with correspondents and camera crews and squeezed other news stories, like President Clinton's visit to Vietnam, into the nooks and crannies between the constant references to overseas ballot tabulations and the latest news from places like Volusia County.

''The story has got everything,'' said Erik Sorenson, MSNBC's vice president and general manager. ''It's got importance and it's got suspense. It's a very rich story, and it's not about sex or brutality. It's deciding who will be the next leader of the free world. If I were not working, I'd be watching this 20 hours a day.''

The cliffhanger nature of the narrative, the changing cast of characters and the backdrops of palm trees, beaches and courthouses have given the network lots to work with. At any given moment in the MSNBC control rooms, the television screens from the various satellite transmissions fill with the faces of experts on Florida law, pictures inside the vote-counting rooms of Palm Beach and Broward counties and on the streets, where Floridians and others hold signs for and against the recounts.

The cable channels have the advantage of sticking with the story for hours on end, but that can also be something of a handicap. If the information emanating from the courtrooms and counting rooms is not coherently assembled, the overarching significance is lost. ''You sit and you watch the Lenos and Lettermans and 'Saturday Night Live,' and you realize that the parody captures the confusion,'' said Ramon Escobar, MSNBC's executive producer. ''But our job is, How do you explain it the minute it happens?''

More than its competitors, MSNBC has been trying to capture visually what is going on behind the scenes. (Anchors like Mr. Holt roam the immense, eye-filling set here, moving from maps to charts to desks.) Sometimes, the attempts are a bit comical, as when one of the correspondents in Texas, Ashleigh Banfield, surprised the Bush campaign chairman, Donald L. Evans, while his car was being filled at an Austin gas station.

But Mr. Escobar says the goal is not to be hip -- ''This is not 'The Blair Witch Project,' '' he said -- but to provide embroidery that gives viewers a more detailed look at the process.

How important that is to the network was underscored at a news meeting tonight, when Mr. Escobar asked the producers to explore more deeply ''the continuing issue of these people handling the ballots.''

Who are they? he wanted to know. ''What is going on at those tables?'' he asked. ''What is it like when there's a dispute? That level of detail is extremely important.''

The people at MSNBC may continue to dig, but they have given up on predictions. The endless twists have worn them down. Mr. Holt said going to bed early one night this week was a mistake; when he woke up to the morning news, he felt as if a crucial news cycle or two already had passed him by.

''This story is the great equalizer,'' said Brian Williams, the network's chief anchor. ''The small and the mighty alike lack a real perspective for where this is headed.''

Photo: An MSNBC anchor, Lester Holt, left, and John Shubin, an election lawyer and network analyst, reading a court order at the studio in Secaucus, N.J. Mr. Holt said he was thrilled to do ''raw reporting.'' (Jeff Zelevansky for The New York Times)