Looking over the headlines this morning, it’s clear that media critics are having a field day piling on the pundits who piled on Hillary and got piled under by reality last night. Critics like me, for instance.
I should note one thing for fairness’ sake, though. The pundits weren’t wrong on the Clinton-Obama race alone. They were joined by almost all the pre-election polls–a different beast than the exit polls that misfired in 2000 and 2004, and polls produced not just by media outlets but independent groups and colleges too. They were joined by the campaigns themselves. And to be totally fair, at least some of the election-eve punditry was based on boots-on-the-ground observation of the crowds turning out on the campaign trail.
They did, nonetheless, get it wrong big-time. But where they got it wrong was not in discussing the poll numbers. The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz charges that “Polls giving Obama an 8- or 10-point lead were accepted as fact.” No, they were accepted as polls, which is not exactly a new, Jayson-Blair-era development.
Where pundits went overboard–way overboard–was in interpreting those polls. “By 9:30 p.m.,” I wrote on Iowa night, “pundits across the cable dial were thoroughly into overexcitement mode.” It was truly something this week to watch the frenzy that set in in the media as pundits began to play a can-you-top-this game in describing the Obama “earthquake” in historical terms. Was he another RFK or another Lincoln? Would he win the White House in a landslide or ascend directly to heaven?
Think about it: before last Wednesday, plenty of people predicted an Obama win in Iowa. But I don’t recall anyone saying, before the caucuses, that if he won, he was a lock for the nomination. That spin was whipped up–and quickly–in the post-Iowa echo chamber. If voters make mercurial decisions based on emotion, they’ve got nothing on the pundit class.
This is the product not of the polls but of the 24-hour media culture, which bestows the plum talking spots and sweetest guest gigs to the people willing to make the most outlandish analogies and most breathtaking predictions. It was like a drunk poker game: You say Obama will win by 10 points? I’ll see that and raise you 5! You say he wins South Carolina? I’ll raise you California!
It’s excusable for the pundits to have said that Obama was winning New Hamsphire, when the polls and campaigns were saying essentially the same thing. The problem was awarding him the remaining 48 states in the process. What the data really said, it turns out, was that there was, and is, a real race, of which no one knows the outcome.
But guessing at the outcome on slim evidence is just too tempting–just ask Howard Kurtz. “I know one McCain friend,” he writes this morning, “who believes that if McCain wins Michigan next week–and many people forget he won it in 2000–he’s got the nomination.”
Just don’t, you know, accept it as fact.