Bush wins election!
p2pnet.net News:- “At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That’s with 51 percent of the precincts reporting,” says an Associated Press story.
Oh. Well, at least this time Bush squeaked in without any suggestion of, well, creative vote-counting.
But wait …. Isn’t the US general supposed to be next month?
Yep, and the report quoted here is highlighted in a boingboing post slugged TV station reports that Bush has been elected President.
The station was WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and, writes Michael Slavitch:
“Remember that TV station that posted the AP article about electing Bush one month early? I sent them a snarky letter, and got a rather elegant and thoughtful response.
“You’ve made your station a laughing stock, so I suggest explanation far more detailed than ‘our apologies’, unless you want to be classified with Fox News as a propogandist joke.”
WBAY Web Manager Ted Miller responded with:
“Hi, Michael. As soon as we learned about the article, we had it removed. Unfortunately, we’re not able to post another story in its place, so we posted a correction on our Home and News page that has a higher prominence (on our site at least) than the original article which was on the web site for 35 minutes.
“We use an automated system for Associated Press national news, politics, science, entertainment, etc. If you see how much news we have on the site, you’ll understand why we use automation (I am a department of one). If we did not have this system, there would simply be too many gaps in how often the entire site is updated.
“The Associated Press tests about 4 times a week for a month prior to an election to help TV stations and newspapers make sure their publishing systems are working properly (yes, I see the irony). The AP’s numbers are completely random with every test; if this error happened yesterday or tomorrow it just as easily could have declared Senator John Kerry or even Ralph Nader the winner.
“We are sorry for the mistake, but it was unintentional on everyone’s part and we responded quickly to remove it.”
Ahhhhh. That explains a lot of things, for example why so many major wires carry items such as ‘Cary Sherman says RIAA has customer interests at heart’, or ‘MPAA’s Jack Valenti blames movie industry misfortunes on p2p networks’.
They’re just tests and aren’t meant to be taken seriously!
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See:-
just tests - TV station reports that Bush has been elected President, boingboing, October 7, 2004
