Dewey defeats Truman! The press takes a hard look at itself

Hillary Clinton on the cover of the New York Post.

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Dewey defeats Truman! The press takes a hard look at itself

The mea culpas are copious today.
Hillary Clinton's political obituary had been written before the New Hampshire primary -- with polls, pundits and conventional wisdom all doing their bit to shovel the final mounds of dirt on the grave. Months before, John McCain had endured the same process.
Only they were all wrong. And that has the chattering classes doing some introspection in the pages of every major newspaper and political publication.
Why did the media do so badly? And is anything ever going to change?

Ben likes: Thomas E. Obama

Daniel Henninger/The Wall Street Journal

I have referred several times before in this space to Tony Blair's observation, after resigning last year, that the pressure of 24/7 electronic media has drastically cut the time available to make judgments, and so the quality of decisions has declined. The missed call in New Hampshire is the first sharp demonstration of this truth for journalism itself. Odds are that nothing will be learned from this because no one has time to think about it.
But as to the media's coronation of Barack Obama after Iowa, what's to explain? They jumped over the moon for Barack. End of story.

Joel likes: Hillary ran against the press -- and won

Gal Beckerman/Columbia Journalism Review

I don’t think it was the pure emotion. I think it has more to do with how the media covered that emotion. They just wouldn’t give her a break. Hillary’s burst of anger at John Edwards during the debate was described as shrill and unhinged; the tears, as I said earlier, were immediately interpreted as some kind of ploy, or a sign of weakness and even emotional instability. It was the voters who saw beneath the interpretation and actually perceived these moments as a glimpse at the real Hillary. The pundits and analysts missed this. To them she was just as inauthentic as ever, the narrative had not, could not, change. What I think the public in New Hampshire responded to—the backlash, if you will—was how these moments were spun. People saw the media’s inability to fit Clinton into any narrative other than the one the press had constructed for her, and they decided to give her a break, believing what they saw versus how they heard it characterized.