Posted on 09/17/2020 8:24:54 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
A watchdog group is requesting that media outlets release their plans for election night coverage amid heightened scrutiny over vote counting and the prospect that a winner in the presidential race may not be named until days after Election Day.
The (*SELF DESCRIBED*) National Task Force on Election Crises, a group of election experts and academics, released a letter Thursday that it sent to The Associated Press, Fox News and the National Election Pool, which includes the three broadcast networks and CNN, urging them to explain to the public how they intend to incorporate the expected avalanche of mail ballots in how they announce winners up and down the ballot.
The letter also warned that outlets will have to be wary that leads on the night of Election Day could be far from final in races where the mail ballots have yet to be counted, given that some states do not allow such votes to be counted until the day the election is actually held.
The media outlets all have election desks dedicated to projecting election winners. Their predictions are often based on early returns and exit polling and survey data. Those projections are often picked up by an array of other publications.
The task force is specifically asking the outlets to take several preemptive actions, including revealing how their exit polling will account for the increase in mail ballots, how they plan to “contextualize discrepancies” between Election Day results and final vote tallies, what kind of efforts they’re taking to protect their political desks from “internal and external pressure — political or otherwise,” and how they will balance their coverage of candidates who declare victory with their analysis of the actual race results.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
No news outlet should declare a winner on election night. Electoral College results are now meaningless and irrelevant. News outlet have to "contextualize discrepancies". Because of mail in votes there may be no winner on election night and the American people have to accept this 'new normal'.
A Chinese fire drill in the offing.
Repeat of 2016.
If it is a blow-out for Trump by 8:30 ET, they will cease delivering updates until they can determine whether they can pad enough votes to push Biden over the finish line.
[That determination should be short — 30 minutes to 1 hour — but they will want to extend it several hours — to build excitement.]
We know the plan—call Biden states early, Trump states late...same as it always was....
The (*SELF DESCRIBED*) National Task Force on Election Crises, a group of election experts and academics
If it were a DNC org, it would be called by its name, or have "bipartisan" or "nonpartisan" added to the beginning.
“Bipartisan” can be used if Kasich, William Kristol or Mitt Romney are onboard. Meetings will begin with hearty hugs by all.
I, myself, have a great concern over how the media will adjust for the intersectionality of the nominative cisgendered mail-in voters.
FYI: I have just written a sentence that had no flags for misspellings, used current social justice words and I HAVE NO IDEA OF ITS ACTUAL MEANING! It is MAD Magazine World!
Once again they will conveniently 'forget' that Florida has a deep red Panhandle in the Central Time Zone, and predict before their polls close, Biden Wins Florida! They've done it before but claimed it was unintentional.
On Election Night in 2016, I had no access to TV so I started checking results on the New York Times website. They were biased as hell (Hillary’s election chances at 98%) but they were the fastest source for accurate returns. They had a computer graph that started with Hillary at 98% and kept falling dramatically as the night went on. It was glorious. I could just picture all those bloviating bigots at the Times resisting the urge to slit their wrists as Trump’s victory became more and more clear.
Bi-somethin' anyway.
Lefty mass media makes “unintentional” mistakes that favor lefties—every time.
Mass media—only sociopaths allowed to work there.
LOL. Romney type plus hugs. I asked for that joke.
Paul Ryan: "Invite me. I'm as bi as anyone. I mean as bipartisan. I mean I've reached out across the aisles to the other guys a lot.
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