The Media’s New Story Line

If you watched the first hour last night of MSNBC’s coverage of the Pennsylvania election results, you would have been preparing last rites for Hillary Clinton. It was all the drying up of her fundraising base, how long can she continue, etc., etc. There were no returns in yet, so it was conjecture driven, I assumed, by exit polling they were not acknowledging, portending an Obama surprise of some magnitude.

What happened was exactly what the pundits predicted a few days earlier. Hillary matched her Ohio margin and got enough of a bounce to go forward. See ya in Charlotte.

Wait, no.

Somewhere between 8 and 9 p.m., as our Tivo was taping Hell’s Kitchen, the story changed. The results didn’t, but the media decided the expected outcome was in fact unexpected. Hillary then gave a “great” speech. Obama gave a “flat” speech. Why can’t Obama close the deal? Hillary has raised two million dollars in the last hour. In Scranton she beat Obama by 50 percentage points. (Obama had similar margins in Philadelphia, but it was apparently not notable.) If he can’t win in Indiana, bordering his home state, is Obama no longer inevitable?

I hate to take you back to Chomsky and the idea of manufacturing consent, but this is how the press drives perceptions and expectations. PA was a push. Clinton didn’t see a bounce to indicate she had grown her piece of the action, and Obama didn’t deliver the coup de grace. As expected. But Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, and Joe Scarborough decided to move the goalposts to keep it interesting.

By this a.m., the networks were full of talk about how the Obama campaign had peaked, can’t expand beyond blacks and tweedy whites, and how Hillary is forming her strategy to turn back the superdelegate tide, and all it will take is a win in Indiana.

Don’t get me wrong—this is shaping up as a very complicated choice between two candidates who could well lose to John McCain. A Hillary candidacy will be predictable, sharp-edged, and the victory, if it comes, will be narrow, the Presidency inevitably fractious—more of the same.

An Obama candidacy will be unpredictable, perhaps dispiritingly ugly, with the possibility of a landslide loss, but with the potential for incredible upside, rearranging America’s attitudes about race and remaking the tenor of our political campaigns.

But can we be honest and say that was the story six weeks ago, is still the story today, and will probably be the story after the final primaries on June 3?

Comments

[Robb]

I hate to say this but isn't this stupidity the result of too much coverage?

Did everyone (but me) see the MSNBC manufactured "incident" where Obama apparently gave everybody (and nobody) the "finger" just before a speech in Pennsylvania? The anchorwomen, who truly does not deserve to be on TV, caught the offending incident in slo-mo and "expertly" reported to the world that his flippin-finger appeared ever so briefly because Obama was upset at his debate performance and Rev. Wright. Huh?

Thus, she so incisively noticed what so many of us missed, that he flipped us all the bird. And it is a good thing she alone noticed this offensive incident. It takes real journalistic skill to be so acutely observant.

I cannot imagine a group of staff people at MSNBC sitting around preparing the news segment, inviting guests, writing copy, and preparing tape for insert could have taken this story seriously for one second. Do they sniff airplane glue on the job?

The coverage of the campaigns is so offensive and mindless that I've gotten to the point where I think it would be best not to have them cover campaign 2008 at all.

Couldn't the broadcast media go back to chasing ambulances; showing alligators eating children; suicide jumpers off tall buildings; capturing angry family members throwing chairs at each other on tape; and other forms of generalized pathology and random mayhem? Please?!