WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin is running an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. (Click image for enlargement."
At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting.
Link (Thanks, Ian Meyer!)
UPDATE:
Satirista sez "AP is now saying the article was a "test article" (WTF?) that was "inadvertently" picked up by WBAY. Now, I've been a freelance writer/journalist for quite awhile, as have
you, but I've never heard of writing "test articles" in advance, other
than advance obituaries for celebrities. Have you? Furthermore, I
Googled '"test article" journalism' and came up with nada."
And, now, if you go to the Link, the site says only "
You have reached a page that is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please use your browser's BACK button to return to the previous page." I hope they keep changing the page. It's funny!
UPDATE: From: michael@slavitch.com
Subject: Site Suggestion – for boingboing
Date: October 8, 2004 7:05:52 AM PDT
To: doctorow@craphound.com, xeni@xeni.net, mark@well.com
—————-begin submit————-
email_name:
Michael Slavitch sez: "Remember that TV station that posted the AP article about electing Bush one month early? I sent them a snarky letter, and got a rather elegant and thoughtful response.
"Go figger!"
Dear WBay Staff;
You've made your station a laughing stock, so I suggest explanation far more detailed than "our apologies", unless you want to be classified with Fox News as a propogandist joke.
——
From: Miller, Ted
Subject: Electing BushHi, Michael. As soon as we learned about the article, we had it removed. Unfortunately, we're not able to post another story in its place, so we posted a correction on our Home and News page that has a higher prominence (on our site at least) than the original article which was on the web site for 35 minutes.
We use an automated system for Associated Press national news, politics, science, entertainment, etc. If you see how much news we have on the site, you'll understand why we use automation (I am a department of one). If we did not have this system, there would simply be too many gaps in how often the entire site is updated.
The Associated Press tests about 4 times a week for a month prior to an election to help TV stations and newspapers make sure their publishing systems are working properly (yes, I see the irony). The AP's numbers are completely random with every test; if this error happened yesterday or tomorrow it just as easily could have declared Senator John Kerry or even Ralph Nader the winner.
We are sorry for the mistake, but it was unintentional on everyone's part and we responded quickly to remove it.
Ted Miller
WBAY Web Manager
