Like the vast majority of political junkies watching the New Hampshire primary, I went into Tuesday night expecting Barack Obama to win, just like the polls said he would.
He didn't.
Butch Ward, a Poynter Institute fellow, says journalists could learn from the wise words of Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor.
Watching the cable channels cover Tuesday night's results, I was struck by how little anyone told me about why people in New Hampshire voted as they did. At one point, I heard the briefest of snippets on one channel that exit polls showed New Hampshire voters had been most concerned with the economy. And yes, I saw charts that told me Clinton had reclaimed much of the women's vote she had lost to Obama in Iowa.
But no one was telling me why.
Why?
With all of this polling power, why couldn't someone tell me why? After almost a year of nonstop coverage, why can't someone tell me what the most important players in this election -- the voters -- are thinking?
Where's the journalism?
Brokaw must have been wondering the same thing. Or maybe he knew.
On MSNBC, Brokaw was the designated analyst for Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, who by 11 p.m. had stopped trying to describe a miracle scenario in which late votes would reverse the Clinton lead. Then, right after Obama conceded the election, Matthews told Brokaw the media would have to rethink its polling methodology.
This exchange followed:
Matthews: Yes sir?
Brokaw: Wait for the voters to make their judgment. (Laughs) What a novel idea.
Matthews: Well, what do we do then in the days before the balloting? We must stay home then, I guess.
Brokaw: No, no we don't stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they're saying. We know, from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. We can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.
But we don't have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed, and trying to stampede and affect the process.
Look, I'm not just picking just on us, it's part of the culture in which we live these days. But I think that the people out there are going to begin to make some judgments about us -- if they haven't already -- if we don't begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases, as we learned in New Hampshire, when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late.
Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald had this angry screed on Jan. 9:
All of the points Brokaw made would have been just as valid even if their Wicked Witch had been crushed last night by 15 points, just as they were all hoping, predicting, and (therefore) trying to bring about. The endless attempts to predict the future and thus determine the outcome of the elections -- to the exclusion of anything meaningful -- is a completely inappropriate role for journalists to play, independent of the fact that they are chronically wrong, ill-informed, and humiliated when they do it. It would all be just as inappropriate and corrupt even if they knew what they were talking about, even if they were able to convert their wishes into outcomes.
But Matthews' response to Brokaw is perfect in several ways. The very idea of discussing issues, examining the candidates' positions, or even analyzing voter preferences does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews. That -- the most elementary nuts and bolts of standard, healthy journalism -- is way, way beyond the scope of what our media stars are able to do or want to do.
Petty personality-based gossip and speculative, worthless chatter is all they know. Drudge, after all, rules their world. He's their Walter Cronkite. And they wallow exclusively in the Matt Drudge currency.