Is Obama Being Hurt By MSNBC And His Other Media Worshippers?
February 6, 2008 -- 4:40 PM EST // //
In light of last night's results, it's time to ask that question.
In the days before the voting yesterday an extraordinary amount of good press rained down on Barack Obama. And no network has done more to push absurdly over-the-top story-lines favorable to Obama than MSNBC has.
The network took the lead in pumping the Ted Kennedy endorsement into an event of truly cosmic significance. Chris Matthews repeatedly hailed Obama as a kind of cross between Jesus, JFK, and Muhammad Ali. One commentator after another predicted that Bill Clinton's antics would mortally wound Hillary's candidacy. In a perfect set-up to the pratfall that followed, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson went on MSNBC and flatly predicted that last night's results would be a "repudiation of Bill Clinton." Like, not.
Obviously such good press has its advantages. But there's a very clear downside, too. What was a solid night for Obama in many ways ended up falling way short of the hype that had been built up around it. As Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford aptly put it, this actually hurts Obama:
The chattering crowd's frenzy for this man only raises expectations that he cannot meet. As a result, what was otherwise not too shabby a night for Obama on Super Tuesday came across like a public relations defeat because so much more had been expected.Indeed. As Crawford points out, last night Tom Brokaw went on MSNBC and chastised his colleagues for getting so far ahead of themselves. “Once again,” Brokaw intoned, “in all of our conventional and collective wisdom, we were wrong.” Taylor Marsh rightly noted that Brokaw was "babysitting" his MSNBC colleagues.
Indeed, is it an overstatement to say that the real loser last night was MSNBC? It's easy to read last night's results as basically a repudiation of the network. And not just because so many of the network's predictions proved a bust. The results repudiated the style of punditry that MSNBC traffics in, perhaps more so than any other network this cycle -- the constant speculation, the borderline-pathological obsession with Bill Clinton, the embarrassing Obama worship, the refusal to let the voters have their say.
What will make MSNBC -- and like-minded colleagues -- stop with this stuff? At this point, multiple journalistic worthies have pleaded for sanity. Brokaw did this just last night. And The Politico's John Harris and Jim VandeHei -- two highly-respected journalists -- recently published a long mea culpa about political coverage, concluding that the "answer to excesses and hype in political journalism" is to "respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think."
Nobody is listening to these people, though. So here's a thought. Maybe the MSNBC folks and others like them can be induced to stop this sort of stuff for Obama's sake?
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