Here's what the media must do to fend off an election-night disaster

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

I learned about the hazards of election night the hard way. In late 2000, only a year into my job as the Buffalo News’s top editor, I had to make the high-anxiety wee-hours decision about a main headline for the paper’s first Wednesday morning print editions. The problem was that no one knew for certain whether it was George W. Bush or Al Gore who had won the presidential race.

But sometime after midnight, a major consortium of news organizations, using exit polls, called Florida for Bush. So we put out a front page with the headline “Bush Apparent Winner.”

Thankfully, only a small percentage of our readers would see that edition on their doorsteps. Those early front pages were just tumbling off the presses when new uncertainty about Florida arose. We changed the headline to one that was more accurate, if less satisfying — “Down to the Wire” — with a secondary line stating that Florida was still in contention.

Small comfort, but plenty of newspapers did much worse with headlines that declared Bush a clear winner. A few even gave the race to Gore. And the TV networks? “We don’t just have egg on our face,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw said afterward. “We have an omelet.”

*snip*

[SheltieLover]

1. Tell truth for a change!

[Walleye]

2. The TV news media has a very short memory. I predict

They will fall all over themselves to give the win to trump, who will have already declared himself the winner as soon as the polls close. They haven’t stood up to him yet why should we expect them to now. Depressing.

[SheltieLover]

3. Revolting!

Very true.

[subterranean]

5. I suspect they'll try not to jump the gun this time.

They are aware that more people will be voting by mail this year, and many of those votes may not be in yet by Election Day. So I think most of them will hold off on declaring a winner on Election Night unless it's a landslide in Biden's favor. Maybe not even then. Of course, I might be giving them too much credit.

[Walleye]

7. Yes, I'm hopeful. Not confident that they won't fall for the fat man's BS once more

[Retrograde]

4. Maybe they could spend some time

in the next couple of weeks learning about the election laws in the 50 states and DC. For example, what's the deadline for mail-in votes to be received, what happens with provisional ballots, when are recounts done, etc.

California gives individual counties about 30 days to get their results in, and often the election night results change over that time. I don't expect the results for president to change much from election night, but in some close congressional races it can take a few weeks before all the ballots are processed: it happens in most elections.

The other thing that (specifically MSNBC) can do is tranquilize Steve Karnacki and take away his interactive maps: he's tolerable when speaking on his own, but give him his props and he goes off the deep end.

[Thekaspervote]

6. FYI: Biden has a team of 600 attorneys to deal with any shenanigans..I think he's got it covered