A few million ballots still haven’t been counted. Practically every single bit of commentary until, say, 10 or 11 p.m. Election Night is based on projections, and even then, the results you hear may not include absentee ballots and provisional ballots and things. There is nothing wrong with using a projection as long as it’s a good one.
Yeah, I know I was being reactionary. But they have carried this too far in the past. Almost to the point of “Well, from the first ten votes cast we project…”.
Remember last time around they had to keep retracting things because they jumped to conclusions too quickly?
I don’t remember this happening in any election except in 2000, when it happened in Florida because of the well-known chaos that was going on down there. If the vote counts are passed along with errors in them, then yes, the networks will get their calls wrong. If the numbers are accurate and the methodology is solid, you can make a prediction even with a lot of votes remaining to be counted. On Election Night I thought the networks did a great job explaining why they had called Ohio for Obama even though the count was close and a decent number of votes still hadn’t been counted.
It probably was the 2000 election I’m thinking of … seems like just the other day.
I’m sure I’m reacting to a general annoyance I’ve developed with so-called news programs telling me everything except What Actually Happened. I don’t mean just elections. During the debates we got pre-debate coverage of What We Think the Participants Are Going to Say. Afterwards we got post-debate coverage of Our Impression of What the Debaters Just Said.
Regular news is filled with conjecture about events before actual facts are available (Benghazi).
Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.
I agree there’s a lot more “what’s going to happen next?” coverage than actual reporting on what just happened. And the debate coverage is really awful. They seem contemptuous of the coverage about body language and attitudes, but they won’t stop doing it.
Yes, god damn it. I thought so too.
The thing with “too close to call” is it serves everyone’s purpose, it creates a watchable media narrative but it also gets the vote out.
The idea is, as a political party, you know the nuanced version.
What actually happened takes maybe ten minutes to mention if you talk slow. Got to fill the rest of the twenty-four hour news cycle with something.
Agreed. Walter Cronkite lamented about the 24 hour news cycle. He said there is no longer any time to do proper research on a story. You have too much pressure to constantly feed the news beast.
Yes. One of my friends called to tell me to catch some schadenfreude at the Fox News coverage, and they clawed heavily at the “But Obama is still losing the popular vote” line. I seem to remember one of the anchors asking ‘what does voting matter for if we win the popular vote but can still lose?’ I ended up turning it off around 11:30 central time, and they were still going at it.
Predictably, the next morning a lot of my conservative low-information friends had Facebook and Twitter statuses claiming Romney won the popular vote.
Did he lament this before or after he told those pesky newscasters to get off his lawn?
Things change. We have access to so much more information now, but we have to do some work to make sure it’s the correct information. I wouldn’t want to go back to those “good old days”.