IT surprised us, perhaps as much as it did the White House and the Republican party, that a bunch of United States media organizations, led by media networks and the New York Times (NYT) ventured last Saturday to proclaim on their own steam former vice president Joe Biden as the winner of the US presidential election on November 3.

CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News and NYT jointly projected that Biden had secured enough electoral votes to become the 46th president of the US, defeating President Donald Trump and capturing the White House after a bitter campaign that exposed deep divides in the country.