I went to the election viewing party and ended up making a new friend. I expected the event to be really dry and stressful because it’s a very important election and I’m not that into politics, but it ended up being kinda fun, or at least interesting. Me and my new friend ended up figuring out how to decipher the news report and determine what was speculation displayed as fact and what was actual fact. We ended up turning to a news article that was updating in real time what the votes were for each open seat. It showed the percentage of votes for each candidate and the percentage of votes for that district that were already counted. The tv program, meanwhile, flipped between showing what seats were Democrat or Republican and what they speculated with few indicators of the change. It made me realize just how skewed the media really is and how that effects public perception. In the last election, media outlets kept reporting that whatever side the show leaned towards was winning because they took skewed data. This caused many voters to feel secure when they shouldn’t have been. The same thing could have easily happened during this election where overconfidence based on skewed data causes the results to be even more skewed.