Thursday, March 06, 2008

Hillary Clinton Ahead in Popular Vote, Yomiuri Reports

That’s bad news for all you Obama fans, right? Yomiuri says ABC says, so it must be true, no? But then, why aren’t you hearing about it from the rest of the mainstream media?

So me and my curiosity go lookin', and the ABC website does say: Hillary Clinton 13,571,404 votes; Barack Obama 13,567,226votes. What ABC doesn’t bother to tell you, though, is that ABC is including the returns from Florida and Michigan in the count. Look. Here, and here. Chances are, you won’t arrive at precisely those numbers when you add them up - US media do a horrible job of maintaining their election data bases - but the figures are close enough to know that the returns from the two states have been included in the totals. That’s the real story here, of course, but do you think the Yomiuri bothered to check?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They probably didn't, if the article was written in Tokyo, and not in DC. I'd check the byline.
DS

Jun Okumura said...

Written by Takashi Sadahiro, a correspondent who has been working in Washington for quite some time now. He could be the bureau chief.