Who Died And Made Them Boss?
You may remember a similar taunt, whether between sibling children or on a school playground…someone would get a little too bossy, and one of those resisting would ask, “Who died and made you boss?”
That’s the way I feel about the Associated Press, the AP.
It used to be that we had multiple news services, such as United Press and International News Service, to go along with the AP. That served as a good check on reporting, to have multiple outlets you could consult for accuracy.
But UP and INS merged into UPI…which itself slid from the scene. That left AP, and many folks resist the “AP’s way or the highway” approach to things.
We no longer subscribe to AP here…it wasn’t worth the cost for how little we used it (mainly for sports), and some of us had concerns about the direction of the news coverage.
That background leads us to questions I’ve been asked in the past week, wondering why Iowa election officials haven’t given final results in the first congressional district race…since the race has not been “called” yet.
Reality is that nearly all the precincts are in…and that elections are never final until results are certified by the Secretary of State. That takes place, in the normal process, tomorrow. So even though we think we know who won in the other districts, nothing is official until…well, the officials say so.
So what’s all this “the race is called” stuff, then? The one calling races at this level is the AP…and for whatever reason, a 796 vote margin is apparently not enough for them.
That gets us back to “who died and left them boss”—I supposed UP and INS died, and AP is left…but we are the ones who allow them to be boss.
So let’s break out of that. I hereby call the race in the first district for the incumbent. We’ll actually know tomorrow, but since AP doesn’t have repercussions for a bad call or a no call…I probably won’t either. Consider it called, then.
After all, 796 is a landslide compared with the 6 votes the incumbent won by four years ago.
