Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Another Black Eye for the Mainstream Media


After the Iowa caucus a few days ago, the mainstream media went into near orgasmic reporting mode and had basically declared that Barak Obama (or as Ted Kennedy called him in a speach, Osama Obama) was to be the Democratic nominee for US President this year.

I saw stories on how Hillary Clinton was basically done for and that her closest people were resigning and jumping from the sinking ship that was her Presidential campaign.

All the major media outlets' polls showed Obama with a pretty impressive lead going into the polls in the New Hamshire primary.

But at the end of the day, I'll be dog if Mrs. Clinton didn't win in New Hampshire, and the media's polls ended up being as much as 10% wrong. That's a HUGE discrepancy, folks.

On the Republican side, McCain won within a percentage point of what the media's polls had shown. Pretty darn accurate.

But today, the media are not ashamed of their big boo-boo in predicting the New Hampshire Primary winner, not one little bit.

From all that went on from Iowa and New Hampshire, at least on the Democratic side, we can learn two things. (Maybe more, but I just want to highlight the two biggies.)

1. The mainstream media aren't the king makers they like to think about themselves. They felt they were pretty much single-handedly responsible for the Democratic swing the Senate and House of Representatives took in November of 2006, and were stumping as hard as they could for Obama.

Yeah, that didn't work out for them very well.

And...

2. Crying in public gets you some serious votes. Hillary's day-before tearful platitudes about just how deeply she CARES really worked wonders for her.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images. The photo up there was taken at the lunch in New Hampshire where Hillary nailed the "chick vote" by letting her voice crack in an almost-about-to-cry kinda way.)

This was so successful for Mrs. Clinton that I think maybe Fred Thompson is planning to try the cracking-voice, my-feelings-are-so-deep-that-I-can-barely-keep-from-crying as a last ditch effort to pick up his numbers for whichever primary is next.

3 comments:

none said...

I'm standing behind Fred. It's the only rational choice.

Beverly said...

I love it.

The Rock Chick said...

great post! I don't know why the media spends so much time with these polls, anyway. It doesn't matter until people have gone into the booth and voted. I have changed my mind at the last minute. I'm sure many other people have, too.