Press No Longer Qualified To Help Us Pick a President

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted January 16, 2008.

The dismal truth about New Hampshire was this: Never has a Granite State primary received so much media attention and been covered by so many journalists. And never has the press so badly botched a New Hampshire vote.

Recall that one of the apparent turning points in the New Hampshire primary came during the January 5 ABC News-Facebook debate, broadcast by ABC News, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) launched a passionate soliloquy about her accomplishments and her desire to "make change" after an opponent tagged her as being "status quo." Her forceful response created an immediate buzz in the debate's press room.

And for good reason. Election observers often love these kinds of unscripted outbursts since they not only break up the campaign trail monotony, where tightly controlled messages are the norm, but they can sometimes define a candidate and a race. It was Ronald Reagan's famous New Hampshire debate eruption back in 1980 -- "I am paying for this microphone!" -- that established him as a fighter.

Not so for Clinton. At least not among the press corps, which immediately pounced. Time's Karen Tumulty claimed Clinton's "flash of anger" had reporters "gasping in shock." Time.com's political blog, Swampland, quickly posted an item about how Clinton's debate response might be the moment observers looked back and pinpointed when Clinton "lost" New Hampshire and the nomination. ABC News' Jake Tapper claimed Clinton became so enraged onstage that he couldn't even "understand what she was saying," and either way, it was likely to "recoil" voters. NBC's Chuck Todd announced that the exchange was "not good" for Clinton. The New York Observer asserted that Clinton was "almost screaming." (She was not.) And after watching the debate, The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach suggested that Clinton's campaign needed to fit the former first lady with an electric shock collar that could zap her when she went astray -- when she became "screechy" -- like a dog being trained on an invisible fence.

It was quite amazing: A roomful of mainstream journalists, representing a host of different backgrounds, ages, and perspectives, all watched the debate and they all came to the exact same conclusion about Clinton's signature response: She blew it big time.

What was also telling was that none of those pronouncements were based on what voters in New Hampshire thought of the debate, or of Clinton's response. They were based solely on what journalists thought of the debate. And they hated Clinton's show of passion.

It turns out ABC News had assembled a focus group of voters to watch the debate and, according to Time, "hooked up voters with electrodes to monitor their brain activity. [Clinton's] flash of anger when the boys ganged up played well with all of them." But again, what did Jake Tapper do? Without checking in with any New Hampshire citizens, he immediately posted an item, which was then linked on the Drudge Report, that announced that Clinton's anger would likely cause voters to "recoil."

In today's campaign coverage, what journalists think about unfolding events takes precedence over what voters think. Voters have become essentially secondary, props in the background that are occasionally queried for a color quote. And that's a big reason why the press missed the New Hampshire story -- that, and the fact that the press was so anxious to write Clinton off as "toast."

It's true that most of the polling data failed to predict Clinton's strong showing in New Hampshire, which also explains why the press corps was caught so off-guard. But the fact remains that there appears to have been a massive voter shift within the New Hampshire electorate in the 72 hours before the vote, a massive shift that nobody in the media detected.

As Media Matters for America's Eric Alterman noted last week, virtually all the corporate press does these days is shallow, polling-based horserace coverage, and now it can't even get that right.

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