The truth: It's almost always in the fine print

By Tatiana Prophet

The headlines on our iPhones arrive with the steadiness of Big Ben. Many of us rely on these pithy pronouncements — custom-delivered by algorithms — to shape our day; or at least our morning.

Life in 2020 has been punctuated by this new customized version of the town crier; like the users that we are, we get the jolt of fear, anger, empathy or collective relief as we read the convenient summarizations on Apple News. Of course, in 2020, relief has been almost non-existent.

It’s been no different for the third act of this horrific year: the General Election of 2020. Apple News is like a megaphone for our trusted media — the three big networks, CNN, and ever-present, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Beginning on Nov. 4. The Associated Press and FOX News had called Arizona for Joe Biden, and four other states were looking like Biden was overtaking Trump’s early lead.

For those of us who had watched the 2000 General Election, it felt like deja vu. Times five. Why would anyone care, right? We want normalcy again — yes, I agree.

So then, why even continue to allow for Trump to fight the election results? For one thing, our trusted media has their thumb on the scale.

The court battle to prove election fraud is far from over; there have been thousands of sworn affidavits alleging everything from post office backdating to boiler-plate mailed ballots being trucked in at four in the morning, to analysts basically agreeing with Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic lawmakers alleging that it’s incredibly easy to alter the election tabulation.

Yet none of these allegations hold any water with our trusted media. Any court defeat is definitive, and spells defeat for the Trump campaign because, well, Trump.

Not all of us remember Bush vs. Gore in the year 2000. But I do. We the People were confused that Gore conceded before we could get to the bottom of how the people actually voted in Florida. Back then, when Bush was inaugurated, there was a lot of grumbling by Us. We did not feel right about it. But we begrudgingly went along for “continuity of government.”

Twenty years later, and we are going through the same thing. The American people, on all sides, have a sense of unease as far as confidence in the process. So why aren’t our trusted media curious as to how the people actually voted? Better minds than me would know the answer.

But in the meantime, we observe that the court challenges are far from defeated, in spite of our trusted media’s voluminous headlines to the contrary.

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign appealed the decision by Judge Brann which threw out their complaint. And the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday decided to hear it in an expedited manner. That doesn’t sound like a definitive defeat. Because the next step is the Supreme Court.

And the fine print? Well, it shows that the Trump campaign isn’t trying to disenfranchise votes in largely blue-leaning Philadelphia. Rather, if you read it using the link above, you’ll see that the allowing of Philadelphia voters to “cure'“ their ballots, the “red” counties in Pennsylvania did not get the same courtesy. Rather, these areas had a cut-off on when their absentee ballots would be accepted. There’s your fine print, and God forbid any of our trusted media would provide that nuance to us as we awake to our Apple News town crier.

We are left wondering, why wouldn’t our trusted media want to know exactly how the people voted? No matter who is the one refusing to concede, we owe it to ourselves to find out exactly how the people did vote. In every state.

And any media insisting this is a done deal is pulling a fast one on us. Not on Republicans, or Democrats in 2000; but on every single one of us.

It’s not over. We the People decide when it is. Not our most “trusted” media, no matter how good they are — or think they are.