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When major news outlets screw up and everyone gets pissed, they actually take it as point of pride. They think their unwillingness to fix it proves they’re not vulnerable to outside pressure.
It never even occurs to them that they might just be wrong.
Call the damn election.
It never even occurs to them that they might just be wrong.
Call the damn election.
The irony: the media IS responding to outside pressure. Going into this we demanded they not prematurely call it for Trump during the red mirage, and not let Trump call it for himself. Which they obliged. But now they’re afraid to call it for the actual winner.
It’s like training your dog not shit on the carpet, and the lesson your dog learns is that it shouldn’t ever take a shit again. And when you urge it to take a shit outside instead, it refuses to, and is proud of it.
They’ll call it for Biden this afternoon. He’ll be fine. But this fiasco is a major breach of trust. It’s done damage the the public’s willingness and ability to trust the media. It won’t be forgotten. Next time around we may not end up believing them, even if we should.
The people running the major news outlets will always insist that the math backed them up, and that it’s unfair how pissed everyone is at them. But they’ve taught us how to be good at the math, and so we know they’re stalling. Their on-air personalities are laughing at them too.
Why even have a Kornacki doing the math for us, if they’re not even going to let Kornacki be involved in calling the race? Why is it up to some guy behind the scenes who’s cut off from everyone? It’s not “editorial independence” if the guy behind the scenes is just wrong.
Here’s the wacky part: of the six or seven major news outlets whose calls will be taken as a sign that the race is over, NONE of them have called it yet. If they were working independently, at least one of them would have been there by now. So is there coordination going on?
It would be one thing to wait til they know PA is going to end up being outside the 0.5% recount margin. But we’re way past that point. The trend is 100% clear on every kind of ballot coming in. They’re waiting until Biden’s lead actually gets over 0.5%, just to cover their asses
This is like a football team being up three touchdowns with ten seconds left, and the announcer refusing to acknowledge that we know who the winner is, even though it would be literally impossible for the other team to come back. Except the fate of the nation relied on that game.
This race was over on Wednesday morning, after Wisconsin end Michigan flipped and demonstrated that Pennsylvania was going to do the same. But as late as Friday morning I was still giving the media benefit of the doubt for not calling it. Not anymore. This is just embarrassing.
The kicker is Biden will clearly win Pennsylvania by a much bigger margin than Wisconsin. Once the mathematical trend was established, there was no doubt about Pennsylvania. If your ladder is tall enough to reach the taller painting, you know it also reaches the shorter painting.
Going back to the axiom that everything the major media outlets do is about ratings and page views, their hesitance to call the race is likely out of fear they’ll alienate Trump supporters and lose them as potential audience members going forward.
If they wait to call the race until the margins are large enough that even idiot Trump supporters can see he’s lost, maybe they won’t blame the media for his loss. But that’s not valid. “40% of the country is too stupid to understand this news” is not a reason not to report it.
The media has spent the past four years obsessing over Trump supporters as if they were the majority (they’re not), as if they were going to determine the outcome of the election (they didn’t), and as if they were major drivers of ad revenue dollars (they’re not).
It’s as if the media has brainwashed itself into forgetting that the rest of us are the majority. We outnumbered Trump voters by three million last time. We’ll outnumber them by seven million this time. Yet all the media ever talks about is “Trump’s base”
The media shouldn’t be pandering to any group. But even if they are pandering for ratings, the group to pander to would be us. We’re the clear majority, and we always have been. We’re the ones who want to watch actual news. We’re their audience, not Trump supporters.
So even from the standpoint that they’re being inappropriate by pandering to anyone to begin with, they can’t even do pandering right. Trump supporters will scatter and ignore politics for a decade after this. They’re not even relevant to any discussion about the future.
The media also seems to have brainwashed itself into believing Trump himself has a future after this, that he’ll be powerful, that he’ll take revenge on them. But in reality he’ll be too busy playing defense in terms of criminal charges for the rest of his life.
The media has spent the past four years ignoring the fact that Trump is obviously going to prison after this, because they didn’t want to get ahead of the narrative. But along the way they seem to have tricked themselves into believing Trump somehow has a future after he loses.
It’s the latest reminder that major news outlets live in a bubble, largely impervious to what’s going on outside it, and whenever that gets them into trouble they take it as a point of pride that they have too much “integrity” to listen to anyone who tells them they’re blowing it
