Donald Trump blames Fox News for his loss – and may have just given something away
Donald Trump just attacked Fox News thirteen times in a row, and then retweeted Scott Baio. I’d say Trump is taking his loss pretty well.
In all seriousness, it’s becoming clear that Trump blames Fox News for his loss, and that’s worth examining. Fox was the first TV news network to call Arizona for Joe Biden. Now that the straggler votes have finally been counted in Arizona, Biden has won the state by about 12,000 votes, meaning Fox appears to have been justified in calling it for Biden when it did. At no point during the counting this past week did Trump come within 10,000 votes, so the outcome never really was in doubt. But here’s the thing.
While Fox News did have legitimate mathematical basis for calling Arizona for Biden, I would guess that it did so because it was expecting the other TV networks to do the same at any moment, and it wanted to be first. Since Fox now has to head into a post-Trump era, it might as well take a shot at perceived legitimacy by being the first network to call a red state for Biden, right?
But when Fox News made the call, it appeared to perhaps spook the other TV networks into not calling it. After all, why would legitimate TV networks want to look like they were simply parroting Fox News? And so they waited… and waited… and a week later the other TV networks still haven’t called Arizona for Biden. Nevermind that the vote counting is over and Biden won by about 12,000 votes; they’re still waiting – at this point for literally no reason beyond the fact that they’ve already waited too long.
This may not be precisely what’s been going on behind the scenes, but it seemingly has to be pretty close. In any case we deserve to know why the major media outlets have been taking such inexplicable approaches to calling or not calling these states – particularly Arizona.
To give you an idea of how important this is, if the TV networks were to call Arizona for Joe Biden right now, it would mean that Trump couldn’t get to 270 even if he did somehow overturn the results in Pennsylvania and Georgia. That’s not going to happen anyway, but taking Arizona off the board would officially end the illusion that Trump somehow has a magical path. The media is simply afraid of being seen as shutting down Trump’s final con game too quickly, and we’re all being punished for it.
