We could know Virginia at 7. 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.
David Plotz, editor of the website Slate, shares a similar sentiment, but is blunter in his word choice:
Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird … drama that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency. We will call it when a sensible person — not a TV news anchor who has to engage in a silly pretense about West Coast voters — would call it.
These claims are incredibly pretentious and dangerous. These claims put a lot of trust in exit polls, which are notoriously unreliable (remember how exit polls showed that Kerry was going to win in 2004?). Announcing the “winner” of the election before the results from the West Coast are in effectively disenfranchises West Coast voters. Prematurely announcing a "winner" effectively says, “Don’t even bother voting, your vote doesn’t matter to us” to everyone on the West Coast (great way to attract a West Coast audience, CBS!). Indeed, the article then goes on to describe how, in 1980, a similar claim resulted in an estimated 2% decrease in voter turnout in California and lead to Jimmy Carter conceding to Ronald Reagan before the west coast results were in! By announcing a perceived “winner” before all the results are in, the media is, essentially, selecting the next President for us. Is that what we really want?
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