Analysis for Journalists and Editors about Announcing Winners Before Election Day

STRAIGHT FROM HORSE'S MOUTH.....

I presume a few voracious readers at OEN saw the CNN articles over the past few days about our paper, New Mexico Sun News, headlining: OBAMA WINS!

It was written by the CNN Senior Correspondent, John King, and I am grateful for the coverage, not at all because of the 600 comments running the usual crazy range from thoughtful to enraged, but more because it has led to further coverage by many US newspapers, two London Dailies (the Mirror and the Telegraph), newspapers in India, Romania, Taiwan, and Pakistan, loads of US TV station little brief stories, etc.

However, the CNN article was conceptually flawed and lended itself to a kind of sensationalist interpretation of what we did and why,which then gets carried on in a weird way (I hesitate to say VIRAL, as six months of Obama campaigning have made me instantly skeptical of that word).

It is unfortunate that the original CNN story didn't mention the 14 page
article that was a compendium of the 38 best editorial page endorsements from all over the United States, and neglected to mention, as we did in the article, that we were justified in saying Obama Wins! because he had just won the Scholastic Magazine election by mostly sixth graders.

These 38 endorsements, plus about 20 more, are posted at mybarackobama.com in my personal blog, listed under Stephen Fox. They are also posted in 7 very long articles at opednews.com, and there is an opportunity to comment at will and at length.

This was not a stunt, whatsoever. There was absolutely nothing in jest in my article, but perhaps a bit of tongue in cheek stance in my Managing Editor's statement, Jerry Greenker, whose idea this actually was, and I was very proud to support this great idea.... 

Our next issue comes out 4 days after the election, and his victory would be old news by then. We are not seers nor fortune tellers, but we are, like many Americans, Poli Sci wonks, historical scholars with keen focus on political journalism, and Democratic strategists. I personally have been concentrating on making happen the editorial page endorsement avalanche for Obama we are seeing now, and like a gardener, I am very very proud to hold up the first fruits of victory, even if we are a bit ahead of the hounds and ahead of the vote counters.

The comparison with the Chicago Tribune and Dewey is absurd, extraneous, and totally irrelevant. They printed several hundred copies the night of the election thinking Dewey had won. We printed 11,000 copies ten days before the election, sure that Obama will win.

We are proud of endorsing him in this way, to just declare him the winner, which apparently you would have known if you were still in 6th grade. We would do it again in a second, with no regrets, except for a bit of hate mail from some very very angry Americans, ready to fly off the handle at just about anything....

By making this out to be a "stunt" or a "prank," the Senior Political
Correspondent at CNN dismissed our motivation. Nonetheless, we are glad we did what we did, and certainly not "just to be first." The endorsements are all at OpEdNews.com and at mybarackobama.com at my blog site: read them in succession, and by doing so, I truly you will comprehend more clearly our effort and its integrity.

Stephen Fox, Contributing Editor New Mexico Sun News
stephen@santafefineart.com