Few people are gullible enough to believe everything anybody tells them.  But how suspicious is it when nearly everybody seems to be telling you the same thing even though you know of obvious exceptions?  How about when people flat-out lie and misrepresent?

Whom are you going to believe: the mainstream media or your own lying eyes?

Some skepticism is called for when the mainstream media are so uniformly in agreement about anything, let alone about a hotly disputed presidential election.

"President-elect" is the legal term for the person with 270 or more votes cast in the Electoral College, which doesn't even meet this year to cast those votes until Dec. 14, a month in the future.

Then, and only then, will we have a "president-elect."  And maybe not even then if the investigations of corruption in several states haven't concluded and hold up certifying state election results.

So, at least until then, the correct term for Joe Biden is not "president-elect," despite the mainstream media gratuitously hanging that title on him.

It's not a casual mistake.  Check CNN, CNBC, USATODAY, CBS, Politico.  Even Al Jazeera.

More accurately, Biden should be referred to as "the guy who has been hiding in his basement and demanding that you wear a mask."  Or maybe "the daddy of the guy with no particular known skills who has apparently made himself rich by selling access to his dad to China, Ukraine, and who knows whom else."

Or, if you want to be charitable like Bill Whittle and extend grace, the proper technical term for Biden is "some guy."

Purposeful distortions like referring to Biden as what he isn't are designed to reinforce the idea in the public mind that the election is over.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

It's a tactic perfectly captured by this New York Times headline: "Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud."

You can bet that you can find an official in every state who will say that.  Whether it's an official in a position to know is an entirely different question.  Whether it's an honest official without an agenda to advance is another question altogether.

But enterprising reporters can always hunt down an "official" to give them the answer they want.  It's a skill soon mastered by even the greenest cub reporters.  I've known editors who instructed reporters to "call so-and-so if you need a quote."  You knew that the editor knew what the gist of the quote would be.

Contrast that New York Times "No Evidence of Voter Fraud" headline with this headline from the Epoch Times, which is cut from different cloth from what spawned the gray lady in New York: "Implausible Dates on Tens of Thousands of Pa. Ballots."

Ask yourself: are tens of thousands of implausible dates on ballots an indication of "no evidence of voter fraud"?

Maybe the New York Times asked an "official" in Pennsylvania who hadn't yet got the word — even though the questionable Pennsylvania ballots have been in the news for some time.  Times reporters seem to have missed something.

They are missing or more likely ignoring something on purpose — just as George Stephanopoulos intentionally used the designation "president-elect," knowing full well that Biden isn't any such thing and may never be.

Here's the scoop for the New York Times to follow up on, having apparently missed the news reported by the non-mainstream Epoch Times.  More than 23,000 Pennsylvania absentee ballots show a return date earlier than the date they were mailed to voters.  That would indicate that voters received, filled out, and mailed back, and the government received, absentee ballots (drum roll here) before the government mailed them out in the first place.

They arrived back before they were sent?  Nothing to see here?  Move along?

That's not even half the story.

The paper reported, "This year, Pennsylvania also allowed voters to 'request, receive, mark and cast your mail-in or absentee ballot all in one visit to your county election office or other designated location.'"

That might explain ballots with no sent date that may have been received and cast in person.  And it could explain ballots with the same sent and returned dates, which appears to clash with the description of the database, which says the sent date is "the date the county confirmed the application to queue a ballot label to mail the ballot materials to the voter."

But "[i]f the ballot was received by the voter in person, there would have been no need for a mailing label," as the Epoch Times noted.

Pennsylvania isn't the Lone Ranger.  In Georgia, where the final outcome awaits a by-hand recount of every ballot, there's this oddity: an official challenge was filed November 2 alleging that as many as 15,000 people registered to vote in Fulton County no longer live there.  Of those, about 1,246 are registered to vote outside Georgia, and at least 24 of them had already voted in Fulton County.

If you no longer live in Fulton County, how do you mistakenly still cast a vote there?  How many of the 15,000 expats also cast ballots in their former home county?

Nothing to see here?  No evidence of voter fraud?

The news outlets sweeping all of these and countless other peculiarities aside are the same journalists who insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russians even after multiple investigations by the government showed he had not.  How is it that they could see nothing but fraud where there was none, but they can't even get a whiff of it where so much looks so suspicious?

To ask the question is to answer it. 

Mark Landsbaum is a Christian retired journalist, former investigative reporter, editorial writer, and columnist.  He also is a husband, father, grandfather, and Dodgers fan.  He can be reached at mark.landsbaum@gmail.com.