Google, Youtube, Wikipedia and numerous other sources are currently pushing the line that "The Associated Press" is charged with the responsibility of calling American elections. (AP Timeline)
While I am not a fan of Trump, I love calling out the media for false narratives like this.
Wikipedia starts its article on the AP by highlighting that the Associated Press is a "non-profit cooperative." Leftists love the terms "non-profit" and "cooperative."
The AP sounds like a utopia!
Yes, the word "cooperative" is a pleasing word. But one has to look at who is cooperating with whom before judging the cooperative.
The AP is a BUSINESS cooperative. A common term for "business cooperative" is "cartel."
Businesses form cartels so that the can they can define and control the market. The AP cartel was created by powerful newspapers so that they could control the news market.
The Wikipedia article for the AP states that one of the goals of the AP Cartel was to reduce news to a commodity which can then be traded on the open market.
This idea that we should seek to reduce products to a commodity is a central theme in an influential book titled Das Kapital by a man name Karl Marx.
The AP appears to be one of the first entities to fully embracing the world view espoused in Das Kapital
The AP was started by powerful newspapers in New York to share the cost of building a telegraph system to report on the Mexican American War. (It was born for war journalism). The cooperative expanded during the Civil War.
I want to point out a strange thing about the AP Cartel. The cartel was created for the purpose or war correspondence. I've noticed through the years that the AP has a tendency to run articles that draw the United States into wars. Once the US is in the war, the AP cartel starts running articles critical of the US's involvement in the war. Go figure?
The AP clearly started as a cost sharing mechanism. It's monopolistic tendencies did not surface until the late 1800s
The Cartel members developed the AP as a non-profit structure so that they could maintain control over the cartel.
The term "non-profit" does not mean a group is a charity. It means that the books are controlled by an outside force. The AP Cartel is an non-profit because it is controlled by powerful newspapers which were seeking to make a profit from the AP's work.
I want to repeat this: The term "cooperative" means that the AP is owned by powerful newspapers. The term "non-profit" means that the AP is beholdened to the powerful entities that own the cartel.
If the AP was organized as an independent for profit business, it most likely would have gone into competition with the busineses that created it.
The AP Cartel was created to lower the cost of reporting on foreign wars. The AP began selling news stories to newspapers outside of the US.
In 2008, Forbes ran an interesting report on the AP which noted that only about 30% of the AP's revenue comes from US newspapers. 37% of the revenue comes from foreign newspapers and the rest from other services.
Newspapers tend to be highly political entities. Newspapers around the world often have questionable relations with governments.
So, the AP is an international organization with questionable ties to foreign governments.
So, lets get back to the idea that that the American People should accept that the AP Cartel as the entity that calls American Elections.
Wikipedia and other sources note that the AP started reporting election results shortly after its creation.
The AP is a news agencies. All news agencies report election results. There is absolutely nothing special about newsagencies reporting votes. Saying that the AP reported election results in its first years of existence is like saying Nike sold shoes in its first years.
Nike sold shoes in its first years because it is friggin' shoe maker.
It is common for news agencies to report on elections.
The problem that standard news agencies have is that responsible agencies wait for the votes to be counted and certified. Newspapers like to scoop competitors, so they create and report estimations before the official count.
The AP developed a system of Exit Polls. They would report on these exit polls.
The exit poll is not the voting result. People answering the polls might lie about their vote.
Exit polls are especially inaccurate when there are political parties willing to engage in violence.
I do not intend to imply that the Democratic riots of 2020 were violent. In 2020, Democrats engaged in peaceful looting of area businesses. The violence that the world witnessed was soley on the part of greedy merchants trying to protect their property.
But lets get back to the AP's role in reporting elections.
The AP election results are estimates of the official election results.
This idea that we sould accept the AP reporting as the official results has numerous problems.
The first problem is that the figures reported by the AP are often one step removed from the actual results.
The second problem is that the AP is a business cartel owned by powerful interests with questionable motives.
The third problem is that AP is no longer just a national cartel. It has morphed into an International Cartel. The AP makes more money abroad than in the US. The AP is a multi-national corporation with all sorts of strange political entanglements.
We spent four years lambasting Trump for having alleged foreign entanglements. Why would we accept a multi-national cartel as the definitive source for election results.
The US Founders understood that it would be easy for players to manipulate the vote. They made the state legislatures the primary arbitor of state wide elections.
For national elections, they created a complex system with a periodic census that would be used to create voting districts and they created an Electoral College to have the final say in the election of the president.
The Constitution clearly lays out the process of electing a president.
I do not like Trump. But, I agree that the official mechanism for electing the president should be considered the definitive mechanism for calling the election.
The recount is highlighting some very troubling things in the electoral process.
I drew the image below from Youtube. Youtube and Google have business associations with the Associated Press. Google (which appears to be a member of the AP Cartel) is claiming that the cartel has robust mechanisms to insure election integrity and that the AP should be accepted as the definitive source for election results.
Google and Youtube advertise a close relation with the AP. Is Google a member of the AP? If so, then Google is engaged in a deeply questionable act by presenting an extra-legal entity as the source that calls US elections.
I don't like Trump. Please put your distaste for Trump aside and ask: Should a international business cartel be accepted as the source that calls US elections?
Eloquently said here! It is comical that AP is claiming it's great that it started calling elections results in the beginning. Like your awesome line of Nike, that's what you kind of do when you are a paper, you write you know, stuff about important events.... like an election.. the doublespeak is too funny.
The claim in Wikipedia that the AP was somehow special in that it reported election results really floored me. Every newspaper report the election results of interest to a community.
Historically, the AP's first reports were based on exit surveys. The exit polls were often wrong and fell apart completely in 2016.
The claim that the AP calls election is really off base when its historical first call wasn't even based on the actual vote.
I think the main things to point out are that the AP was designed as a cartel that eventually ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act. It now gets more money from abroad than the US ... so it is a multinational cartel.
People are nuts to buy the line that The AP Calls our elections.
Yes they should be charged.
Oddly, nobody on the right was annoyed at AP when they called 2016 for Trump.
Also, a "call" is completely unofficial. We get that from the vote of the Electoral College.
My post was about the claim made by Youtube. The image shows Youtube's official stance that the AP called the election.
This is the first time that I have ever seen a credible group presenting the AP results as if they were the certified results.
BTW: I've seen the left and right clash over election results. They clash over counts in all close elections.
My post is about a completely new thing. It is about presenting AP Results as if the AP's call was the actual election result. I have never seen that before.
Here is the AP's official page. It appears that they are trying to take on a government function when they really only have a reporting function.
I personally don't like that Trump is demanding so many recounts. Unfortunately, whenever a candidate demands a recount there is no option but to wait for that process to finish.
We have to wait for the end of the recounts even in situations where the candidate does not have a clear path to victory.
PS: I agree 100% that the Electoral College is the vote that counts for determining the US president.
The scary thing is that the state legislatures have the ultimate say in how the state selects its electors. Most states tie their vote to the vote count. Some states have tried to change this in recent years.
Yes, they called the election. So what? But that's quite different from certified results.
You or I can have personal "official" stances that that candidate X won just as YouTube can have a corporate "official" stance.
No, we don’t have to wait. We can declare that candidate X won. Trump’s repeatedly declared that he won. He’s wrong, but he’s free to declare so.
Nowhere on that page are they claiming certified results. They are simply calling winners. We are all free to ignore their calls.