As the vote difference remained around 130,000 votes in Ohio, with an ever-growing percentage of precincts reporting, 65%, 77%, 82%, 93%...CBS and CNN stubbornly refused to concede the obvious as the hours wore on.
Curiosly, they had no such reticence in calling Pennsylvania and New Jersey, for example, quite early, at much lower percentages reporting with similar margins of victory.
How to explain this oddity?
We now have an answer, from the New York Times:
The critical moment came at 12:41 a.m. Wednesday, when, shortly after Florida had been painted red for Mr. Bush, Fox News declared that Ohio - and, very likely, the presidency - was in Republican hands.In other words, the major media outlets decided they were willing organs of the Kerry campaign, and not reporters of facts, even facts blatantly obvious for all to see.
Howard Wolfson, a strategist, burst into the "boiler room" in Washington where the brain trust was huddled and said, "we have 30 seconds" to stop the other networks from following suit.
The campaign's pollster, Mark Mellman, and the renowned organizer Michael Whouley quickly dialed ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC - and all but the last refrained from calling the race through the night. Then Mr. Wolfson banged out a simple, two-line statement expressing confidence that Mr. Kerry would win Ohio once the remaining ballots were counted.
"What was driving our decision making was the memory of how in 2000, by allowing Florida to go for Bush, a lot of momentum was blocked," said one person who was in the room. "Our whole goal was stop the train from moving that way."
For example, Susan Estrich came on Fox to say wait, once Cuyahoga county is finished reporting, Kerry will pull ahead!
Well, this was clearly wrong, and anyone could have see it: I went to CNN's handy election page and could observe the county-by-county results, giving the percentage of precincts reporting and the current margins in each.
One could easily see that most counties had finished reporting, but that yes, Cuyahoga only half reported and Kerry was ahead. And one could estimate, assuming the remaining votes in each county would break like the already reported ones, how many Kerry or Bush votes were still remaining, and assuming precincts were of equal size in a given county.
And yes, roughing it out quickly in my head, Cuyahoga could be estimated to provide perhaps an additional 30,000 Kerry votes, with additional ones in a few other counties.
But the chart clearly showed several Bush counties not fully reported either.
Running through the estimates, I figured Bush could end up ahead by 144,000 votes.
The final figure was about 136,500.
But rather than report mathematically objective facts, the major media outlets decided they'd rather help provide momentum to possible court challenges by the Kerry campaign.
Now partisanship is their right.
It's the hypocrisy of pretending to be objective that rankles.
The Democrats may not control the 3 Constitutionally-described branches of government, but they surely control the unnofficial, and least democratic, fourth branch.
