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During recent national election evenings I've always been bemused by the concept of networks "calling" states for one candidate or the other. It's not the act of "calling" things, per se, but the way people react to these announcements. They're statistical projections only, twice removed from reality. Our only source for these network "calls" is an electronic box that transmits scripted interpretations of a third party's expertise to us in audiovisual format. That expertise is in turn based on the output of numerical models whose content is unknown to us out here in TV Land.
Back in 2000, when few people were looking in the middle of the night, one obscenely biased infotainment network started a stampede of network "calls" that declared victory for the candidate who, in fact, had fewer votes than his opponent. By morning, there was a mass media consensus that George Bush was our President Elect. It all happened in plain sight: the theft of a presidential election gained irreversible momentum because the herd of corporate news media said "me to" in order to share in the glory of the most awesome Fox News political "prediction" of all time.
I apologize in advance for any incoherence in this little essay; I am worried sick about systematic Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, and the fact that virtually all of us mistake corporate network news as a reliable account of reality.
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