Eating Their Collective Feet- News Pundits & Obama

DOH!

So Barack Obama narrowly lost the New Hampshire primary. While I endorse neither Hillary Clinton, or Obama for that matter, there was a bit of glee in watching those returns come in Tuesday night. The political punditry of the mainstream corporate news, who had gone into an Obama-gush fest just days earlier, was left sputtering and trying to explain how all their prophetic predictions of Obama's inevitable rise and Hillary's coming doom could have been so WRONG. Their humiliation alone was worth the outcome of the primary. While they have been puzzling for days now what could have gone wrong, here's a suggestion to add to the mix of likely numerous factors.

All that crowing over Obama's Iowa win may have backfired. The media's herd mentality in declaring the end of Hillary Clinton (eagerly writing her obituary while she was still very much alive), and endorsing Obama as the abstract "change" candidate, may have turned numerous New Hampshire voters off. Perhaps the lily white constituents, reaching down to some good ol' fashioned American racism, didn't like that the media made a white woman cry over a black male candidate. Or maybe it's as simple as no one likes to be told for whom they should vote. When the media were glorifying Hillary Clinton it eventually led to declining poll numbers. Their unabashed endorsement of Obama may have done the same for him.

The good news? American voters may have finally grown weary of arrogant media pundits who think it's their right, privilege and duty to annoint candidates and control the dynamics of a political race. Whatever the case, what Obama's narrow loss in Iowa showed was that the race for president is still fluid, still open and won't be decided by the whims of obviously over-paid corporate news media celebrities.

Some articles below on the debacle of the media and New Hampshire primary


The Race is On

The first lesson to take from the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary is to throw the pundits, pollsters and kingmakers out the window. Armed with smug self-certainty and the slippery intelligence of numbers, they tried to declare the race for President over even before it began.

full article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/editors

A Platter of Crow for the Pundits

*added Jan. 11, 2008

As we have an official Election Day, there ought to be a new national holiday called Eating Crow Day, when we the people who had to watch the nation's army of pundits, pollsters, anchormen and cable news opinionators get to digest their predictions and analyze where they went wrong.

Not since Literary Digest predicted Alf Landon would beat FDR in 1936--a coup it managed to pull off by polling only people with phones during the Great Depression--has there been the need for such a day of mourning after Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in New Hampshire.

full article:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/kitman