PrintNovember 4, 2008
Networks may call election before voting is complete
Never underestimate the perfidy of the media when it comes to trampling decency and promoting their candidate at all costs:
At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.Let me fill you in on what the media is actually going to do; they are going to call the race for Obama even before he reaches 270 electoral votes!
A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”
Similarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David Plotz, said in an e-mail message that “if Obama is winning heavily,” he could see calling the race “sometime between 8 and 9.”
In 1980 when Reagan won in a landslide, at least the press had the common courtesy to wait until he had reached 270 electoral votes to declare him the winner (Carter conceded almost immediately afterward thus condemning some western state senate candidates to defeat when masses of people left voting lines after hearing the news).
This time, they aren't even going to pretend. If Obama captures some states that most experts believe McCain has to have to win, the press is going to extrapolate the results in states where the polls are still open and call it for Obama.
This will not sit well - even with Democrats. They know the shoe could be on the other foot someday and will no doubt move in Congress to do something about this.
It's just a cherry on top to the ice cream the press has been feeding about Obama since he announced his candidacy.
