'How the media blew it in NH', Sky News Online

Friday, January 11, 2008

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Recriminations are flying in the wake of the US media's disastrous performance at the New Hampshire primaries. By James Silver, media reporter Sky News.

For the press, Hillary Clinton's knife-edge victory over Barack Obama in New Hampshire's Democratic primary has proved to be a cautionary tale.

A noxious mix of unbridled hype, flawed polling and hacks a little too close to the story resulted in the American media - along with their foreign counterparts - failing to anticipate what NBC's Tim Russert has branded "one of the greatest upsets in American political history".

Or as media pundit Chris Weigant put it in a column on The Huffington Post:

"The media collectively blew it. Pretty much everyone in the chattering classes got it wrong."

Journalism is taken very seriously in America. Consequently the post-mortems - accompanied by soul-searching and hand-wringing about how things went so badly awry - are well underway.

As the polls closed state-wide on Tuesday evening, Clinton versus Obama appeared to be a straightforward story: namely, that Obama - the charismatic junior senator from Illinois - was the man of the moment.

After his astonishing victory in Iowa, which saw the favourite, Clinton, pegged back to third place behind John Edwards, Obama's momentum seemed irresistible.

And the polls backed up this scenario. Most of them predicted a slam-dunk victory for Obama, placing him anywhere from five to 13% points ahead of Clinton.

But, as the results came in, TV anchors and pundits were left scrambling to cope with a dramatically different result, which eventually saw the former first lady squeak to victory by 39% to 36%.

As the final ballots were counted, the story had transformed from the expected 'Obama rout' to a 'Clinton comeback'. Studio-based strategists and reporters out in the field, alike, appeared to have been caught asleep at the switch.

"Hillary Clinton's victory over Barack Obama seemed to stun no one more than reporters who covered it, raising questions of an over-reliance on polls in setting a campaign narrative," wrote Associated Press TV writer David Bauder.

Trace that 'narrative' back a few days and it is clear that much of the American media was engaged in a full-blown Obama 'love-in'.

As Christopher Hitchens wryly observed in online magazine Slate: "Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool."

While the New York Post's Jonah Goldberg said: "Ever since his victory in Iowa, the long-suspected sense that Obama's got a rendezvous with destiny has broken out like a pandemic."

Goldberg rounded on Newsweek's Eleanor Clift , among others, accusing her of "practically transcribing [Obama's] campaign literature", after she declared that "[he] represents the possibility of reclaiming the national unity America has lost, and his appeal transcends race and party."

Swept along in this growing clamour, even hardened journalists were going weak at the knees over the charismatic senator and his ability to wow crowds.

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who had previously dismissed Obama as "Obambi", said: "The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow, but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again."

Astonishingly, there were even open admissions of a tendency towards pro-Obama bias.

In a frank off-the-cuff exchange with Nightly News host Brian Williams, NBC's political reporter Lee Cowan, who is covering the Obama campaign, admitted in a clip widely-viewed in cyberspace that: "As a reporter it's almost hard to remain objective?because [the fervour surrounding Obama] is infectious?"

Meanwhile, pundits had been queuing up to write off Senator Clinton.

As media commentator Howard Kurtz argued in the Washington Post : "the coverage had been so out of control that there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out. The news surrounding the former first lady had been uniformly negative for days."

A typical example of this was filed by Agence France Presse's Stepehen Collinson, who opened his story by painting a forlorn portrait of the candidate, in which she seemed a spent force, exhausted and dejected.

"Hillary Clinton groped in vain to find a formula to block Democratic foe Barrack Obama, as polls suggested another humiliating defeat loomed," he continued.

But as we now know it was the media which faced humiliation rather than Senator Clinton.

Editors, reporters and anchors rapidly executed what former Sun newspaper boss Kelvin MacKenzie used to refer to as a "reverse ferret" - namely, an instant 180 degree about-turn.

As the recriminations began, many titles directed their ire at the pollsters, for leading them down a blind alley.

"How did the pollsters blow it in the Clinton Obama race?" demanded The Seattle Times .

But polling mistakes aside - and it should be pointed out that the same organisations called John McCain's victory in the race for the Republican nomination accurately - in many ways it was the media coverage itself which was to blame.

From Iowa onwards the Obama juggernaut was depicted as unstoppable and his victory as 'a done deal'.

According to the New York Observer , the media were guilty of "an almost hysterical level of hype" following Obama's "thumping victory in the Iowa caucuses".

Reporting skills were drowned out by what the Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr memorably described as the "blur of Obama-mania".

So what conclusions should be drawn from the New Hampshire media debacle?

Well, speaking on MSNBC, the veteran newsman Tom Brokaw argued that the experience should remind the press that they should not be in the business of "making judgements before the polls have closed" and trying to stampede, in effect, the [political] process."

Or as one reader-post on the New York Times 'TV Decoder' blog phrased it rather more succinctly: "The media needs to back off and let Americans vote!"

You can read more articles by James Silver at www.jamessilver.net

Posted by James Silver - On Friday, January 11, 2008

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