It’s not over yet

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

As the nation waits to find out the results of the election, we hear what it's like to report the news in this moment of uncertainty — with dispatches from political reporters and the editor who’s charged with deciding what goes on the front page.

Buckle up folks. It’s gonna be a minute.

Early Wednesday morning, President Trump falsely declared himself to have already won the election — a move that is far from surprising, according to White House reporter Toluse Olorunnipa. There is not a “precedent in modern history for a president to declare victory in this way when so many votes are yet to be counted,” Olorunnipa says. “But this is what we've come to expect from the president.”

Annie Linskey reports from the Biden camp, where the former vice president urged supporters to keep the faith. “We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying votes is finished,” Biden said. “And it ain’t over till every vote is counted.”

Eugene Scott of The Fix anticipates what’s next as ballots continue to be counted: “It's hard to believe that if this race is as close as it's looking like it's going to be,” he says, “that this won't go to the courts.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It is 12.13 a.m. on Wednesday, and we are just finishing the second edition of the newspaper.
0:11.2	Can you read the headline that's at the top of the front page right now?
0:15.1	It will say a nation divided in big type, and then underneath that type race, high turnout,
0:24.0	reflect partisans split over crises.
0:27.0	It sounds like it pretty much encapsulates the moment right now.
0:31.0	Yes indeed.
0:34.0	From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
0:39.7	I'm Martin Powers.
0:41.7	It's the morning of Wednesday, November 4.
0:49.7	My name is Scott Vance.
0:50.7	I'm a deputy managing editor at the Post.
0:53.6	Along the things I do is help pay attention to and build the front page of the newspaper.
1:00.6	I think that we spent so much time going into Election Day talking about the fact that
1:08.8	this wasn't necessarily going to be decided tonight, that this is a process that could
1:13.7	potentially take days.
1:15.7	Yet I think we're still all here in some ways surprised or just kind of harried about
1:22.4	the fact that we don't actually know what the result will be tonight.
1:27.0	So when you're thinking about the front page and the kind of flux that we're in right now,
1:31.8	how do you and your team think about how to capture that for people who are trying to understand
1:38.8	the news?
1:39.8	Well, you know, what we're sort of required to do in print is to give a snapshot of what
1:49.0	was going on when we put the paper to bed and put it on the presses.
	...

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