Journalism: The Real Loser In The 2008 Election

Carl Cannon casts a skeptical eye on his own profession and doesn't like what he sees.

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don't know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I'm not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

And, Carl Canon gets to a point that I've been making for years. He acknowledges that newsrooms are liberal and that liberalism seeps into the news articles they produce. And this liberalism is contributing to the demise of newspapers.

If being "liberal" now meant sympathy for the Democratic Party, and being conservative implied sympathy for Republicans, all those liberal newsrooms across the country were gradually going to alienate themselves from about half their readers.

Read it all the way to the end. He chronicles newspaper history, then tells how the pretense of objectivity was abandoned last year and how the press was particularly venomous in its treatment of Sarah Palin.

Remember her callous decision as governor to cut Alaska's special education budget by 62 percent? After receiving emails to that effect, CNN's Soledad O'Brien cited the figure on-air. Oops. Palin actually tripled the state's spending on special needs kids.
Did you hear the one about her membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which favors secession from the union? That made The New York Times, and it was wrong, too.

The Media Makes An Ass Of Itself Again

I've begun to wonder lately when journalism turned from reporting news to predicting the future. It certainly hasn't been very honest at the former and now journalism has proved its incompetence at the latter.

Tom Brokaw, like virtually everyone on television, went on the air Tuesday night expecting Hillary Clinton to get whipped in New Hampshire.

"I was buying into all the conventional wisdom as well," says the former NBC anchor, who was struck by how quickly his colleagues backed off their bombast about Barack Obama's imminent triumph.

"The pirouettes are amazing," says Brokaw, who was analyzing the campaign on MSNBC. "The utter confidence with which everyone had been wrong 20 minutes earlier, they have the same utter confidence about what produced this surprise. It's intellectually dishonest."

Clinton's come-from-behind moment came on the same evening that John McCain -- all but buried by the press last summer -- was winning New Hampshire's Republican primary. And it was five days after Mike Huckabee, all but ignored by the media for most of 2007, won in Iowa.

The series of blown calls amount to the shakiest campaign performance yet by a profession seemingly addicted to snap judgments and crystal-ball pronouncements. Not since the networks awarded Florida to Al Gore on Election Night 2000 has the collective media establishment so blatantly missed the boat.

Maybe the front page is trying to emulate the sports page.