Okay, so maybe we appear to be a bit behind the curve?
CNN was the first national media organization to call the Presidential election in favor of Joe Biden, at 11:24am Saturday morning, November 7, followed in quick succession by NBC, CBS, ABC, and The Associated Press.
Fox News confirmed Biden’s victory at 11:40am. Fox commentator Chris Wallace noted the banner displayed across the screen’s bottom edge.
“Here we have, on Fox, the headline… at the bottom of the screen, ‘Joe Biden Elected 46th President of the United States’. On Fox.”
It’s a strange moment in America, when the media has the responsibility to declare a winner. I mean, the media has always declared a winner at some point following a Presidential election; that’s nothing new. Here in the US, ever since 1788, elections have been managed by individual state governments, who each declare an unofficial ballot tally within hours (or sometimes, days) after the polls close on Election Night. But we have no federal agency responsible for counting up the Electoral College totals and officially declaring a winner. The unofficial vote totals are not announced by, for example, the US Congress, or the White House. It’s up to the individual states to announce their totals.
And — based on those individual state-by-state announcements — who then is responsible for declaring a winner, and a loser? The news media, for heaven’s sake?
Everything is made much more civil and respectful when the losing candidate gets on the phone, and congratulates the winner, and then gets up on stage in front of a microphone, at his (or her) campaign headquarters, and makes a concession speech. Here’s Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, conceding to General Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 — the first presidential concession speech to be broadcast on TV:
“The people have rendered their verdict, and I gladly accept it. It is traditionally American to fight hard before an election. It is equally traditional to close ranks as soon as the people have spoken.”
And here’s Vice President Richard Nixon, speaking on national TV to a roomful of supporters in the wee hours of the morning, following the election in 1960:
“I want to say that one of the great features of America is that we have political contests; that they are very hard fought — as this one was hard fought — and once the decision is made, we unite behind the man who was elected. I want Senator Kennedy to know, and I want all of you to know, that — certainly — if this [vote count] trend does continue, that he will have my wholehearted support. And yours, too.”
Senator John McCain, speaking on November 5, 2008:
“My friends, we have come to the end of a long journey. The American people have spoken, and have spoken clearly…
“A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Senator Barack Obama to congratulate him on being elected the next President of the country we both love. In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect, for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so, by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little influence in the election of an American president, is something I deeply admire, and commend him for achieving…”
That’s how it’s typically done.
Almost nothing about Donald Trump’s presidency has been ‘typical’.
So, without a concession speech, and without an official national agency responsible for declaring a winner… well, we are apparently left with the news media, to act as the voice of ‘The People’. Which is, of course, problematic for many of the folks who voted for Donald Trump, and who accepted the President’s claim that the media are politically-driven liars, and purveyors of fake news.
I have long maintained that every news outlet — including the Pagosa Daily Post — is biased to some degree. Sometimes it’s painfully obvious. Fox. CNN. MSNBC. Other times, you might be tempted to think that a particular news organization is successfully maintaining an ‘unbiased’ delivery. I’ve spent the past 16 years covering the news here in Archuleta County — attending public meetings, doing interviews with prominent personalities, studying budgets and laws, and reviewing the coverage published by other local news sources. I’ve made audio recordings of most of those meetings and interviews, to make sure that I quoted people accurately in my editorials. In other words, I often listened to an event two or three times.
I can state with some confidence that we have no unbiased news sources in Pagosa Springs. It’s impossible to tell all sides of a story, and important news stories — stories worth telling — are too big and too complicated to understand completely, let alone describe fully. News reports are written by human beings, and all reporters have biases and shortcomings, no matter how hard we might try to hide them.
So the Daily Post has never tried to be ‘unbiased’. What we’ve tried to do, instead, is to be obvious about our biases.
We cannot doubt that errors were made in counting the November 2020 election ballots. I can’t imagine any process involving the counting of 150 million ballots that didn’t suffer from occasional mistakes. If the errors were unintentional, then they almost certainly averaged out so as to be equally favorable, or unfavorable, to each candidate. I’ve been a media observer during several elections and have seen counting mistakes made — but in my experience, the mistakes have always been caught and corrected by the election judges before the final tally was announced, even if it entailed repeated recounting of the ballots.
If intentional fraud was involved in this election, then we have a different situation. As I write this on November 8, I’ve not heard anyone bring forward evidence of meaningful election fraud committed by Republican Party operatives or by Democratic Party operatives, in this election.
I suspect that Donald Trump may have a very profitable career ahead of himself as a TV personality, should he choose that line of work… and perhaps another run at the Presidency in the not-too-distant future?
But despite the President’s refusal to provide us with a concession speech, the Daily Post is officially calling the election on November 9, 2020, in favor of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It’s the least we can do, to hopefully help our country begin to heal.