The Occasional Observer

Apparently he's taken his slanderous and biased news-ish act to the MSNBC web page as a headline writer, where this link was presented as a headline:

Leftist candidate takes lead in Mexico vote review

Wow! I knew it all along. The leftist is pulling ahead now that the vote count is getting closer scrutiny. Those conservatives are always messing with the ballot box.

Then, upon actually reading the story, you are informed that only a partial count has been completed during a legally mandated review of the ballots.

By Wednesday afternoon, they had dealt with 35 percent of the tally sheets, and said 37 percent of those votes had gone to Lopez Obrador, compared with 34 percent for Calderon.

Not surprisingly, no mention was made of whether these results were any different than the original vote count. For all we knew, Obrador has actually lost ground from the original vote count in the 35 percent of tally sheets that have been rechecked. I have no way of knowing that, but neither, apparently, does MSNBC have anyway of knowing that Obrador's gained ground to back up their claim that he has taken a lead. Using MSNBC's standard of "taking a lead," Walter Mondale could have "taken a lead" on Ronald Reagan if they only reviewed Minnesota's votes first.

They didn't even take the obvious step of pointing out what they didn't know, e.g., if the districts that have been counted were conservative or leftist districts to start with. Of course, I'm probably being too kind. The new 'results' probably don't help Obrador at all, or else MSNBC would have mentioned in the story that "Obrador has made up considerable ground in his X vote deficit in the tallies re-counted so far." The fact that no such statement exists leaves little doubt in my mind that Calderon's in great shape.


UPDATE: 7/06/06 1031 Hrs

So if you click on the link I included above, the headline has now been changed to: