THE FINAL OUTRAGE

Posted at 7:44 a.m. ET

All right, I know that sounds like the title of one of those 1970s thrillers, but it fits.  It was perhaps inevitable that the media would give us one final outrage on this election day.  They always come through, don't they?

One of the great stories of the 2004 election was the wild inaccuracy of the exit polls.  You'd think the press would have learned.  But the press rarely learns anything.  So we have this, as reported by The New York Times:

At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.

Unreliability?  Hey, what kind of a word is that in today's journalism?  It's just another point of view.  Right?

A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m. — before polls in even New York and Rhode Island close, let alone those in Texas and California. At such a moment, determined from a combination of polling data and samples of actual votes, the network could share its preliminary projection with viewers, Mr. Friedman said.

“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “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.”

Everyone knows that one effect of that kind of reporting is to discourage people from voting - especially people on the losing side. 

How long has this campaign been going on?  Two years?  Can't "journalists" wait a few more hours to tell us who won, and keep the election process relatively pure?  I guess not.

“When a candidate gets 270 electoral votes, they’re the next president,” said Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections for NBC News. “If some states are still voting, it’s an unfortunate circumstance, that’s what it is. The founding fathers never expected us to count the votes fast.”

The patriotism.  The statesmanship.  Damn those founding daddies.  What did they know?

When the loser concedes, then we'll know.

November 4, 2008.