Discussion Item of the Week

My problem with the media’s horse race mentality is something Howard Kurtz brought up in his article. The election of 1948 between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey had everyone convinced that Dewey won. The famous photograph from the next day is Truman holding up a newspaper with “Dewey defeats Truman” on it. Truman won re-election and it was a great surprise. Polls are just “snipits in time” as one pollster put it, and it can be nerve-racking to see journalists putting so much faith in these polls.

My concern is, what if Obama doesn’t win? As Perlmutter said in Blog Wars, when bloggers predicted a Kerry landslide, and then there wasn’t one, people though there was some kind of conspiracy. Will people go to this reaction? Or will they react against the mainstream media instead. Like discussed in these articles, and by a Boston University professor, I think the media will lose its credibility should they continue pursuing these types of stories and Obama doesn’t win. How awful will that be when on election night John McCain and Sarah Palin stand up and say “Haha liberal biased media we told you so?” For someone who is looking to get into the journalism field, it is a situation like this which causes for much concern. Can’t we just wait a week? I know its a lot to ask, but from someone who is very superstitious, I’d hate to have them jinx someone, one way or the other.

I love how The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain got four times as many negative stories as positive ones and that Obama had more than twice as many positive stories as McCain, and just half the percentage of negative. What I love even more, is that Politico commented, “As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.”

Regardless of who’s accusing who of being liberally biased, it does make me a little nervous when journalists treat Obama’s anticipated victory as a sure thing. Sure, the polls are leaning in Obama’s favor, but what happens if he doesn’t win? All journalists have left to discuss is premature speculation. Kurtz mentions that Cokie Roberts said, “you’re kind of at the point where you’ve said everything there is to say. We’ve gone through the voter groups, the issues, the running mates, the profiles of the spouses. Now you get to the last week, the polls don’t seem to be budging, and it becomes: ‘What else am I going to talk about?”

After each debate has been dissected, every speech fact-checked and every photo-op abused, what’s left to announce but the winner?

It’s obvious that for American journalists, there is an intense air of anxiety and impatience for November 4th. The question becomes, are the American people ready? Have they tuned in and opened up their papers? Are they ready to make an educated vote? I sure hope so.

I found the explanation for supposed bias in campaign coverage in the Politico article to be interesting. “As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.” This seems, to me, like a very blunt way of answering media critics (and just regular readers, viewers), who accuse journalists and the media of being unnecessarily harsh on McCain and Palin, while favoring Obama.

I think it’s a little ridiculous to call the election, but it’s hard to ignore an Obama lead. It’s actually a little refreshing, in a sense. The political coverage of the 2004 election and the primaries seemed to me to be a manufactured dead-heat at the time. I began to suspect a media-encouraged tight race in just about anything political because who’s gonna’ read the papers if one guy is way ahead?

Nonetheless, the media Obama-fawning makes me cringe. Stories on who he’ll pick for what position are, I’d say, premature at best. Why not hold on to these hot leads and break them as soon as they announce President Obama’s victory, if you’re so sure he’s going to win? Why make it look like you’re rooting for him?

I think stories like this are a good way to handle a candidate with a big lead:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/01/us/politics/01angst.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Instead of the media calling the race prematurely, and then talking about how they’re calling it prematurely, this story looks into how Obama’s healthy lead is playing out among voters.

You can’t ignore the fact that Obama’s winning, but like a good journalist, you could let other people do the predicting for you and do a piece on how they’re going about it, and how it’s affecting them.

The problem with calling the race early regarding the public perspective of media is blatant. Kurtz specifically mentions the loss of credibility in his article, but the backlash may even extend beyond that. The revival in voter interest that Mitchell talks about in his Huffington article is mainly due to voter doubt and skepticism that has arose from the past two presidential elections. A combination of the ineptitude of the Bush administration and the potential historical significance of an Obama victory has helped revive interest in disenfranchised voters who may have sworn off politics all together. If McCain ends up pulling off the upset in a race that has been “over” for weeks now, people will not only be calling for the heads of the journalists reporting these stories, but also for a major change in the electoral process as we know it.