Bold Predictions

"It’s over." That’s how New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow began his column on October 17th, two and a half weeks before Election Day. His column is titled "Nov. 5, 2008" (my birthday!) and predicts that Obama will crush McCain on Election Day. He even describes a scene of Obama waking up on Nov. 5th:

"President-elect Obama (yes, get used to it) could wake up that morning as one of the most powerful presidents in recent American history. Not only is his party likely to maintain control of both houses of the Congress, it could dramatically strengthen its hand."

Blow goes on to talk about the "probability" of Obama receiving a warm international welcome and "possibility" of Obama appointing several justices to the Supreme Court. Man, this guy must be feeling pretty good about his chances to shamelessly play Oracle in the pages of America’s newspaper of record.

Even David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times predicted that Obama would win by 9 percentage points in a Q&A with students of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Let’s be real. No reputable journalist would risk being wrong so publicly unless they felt good about their information. These predictions openly rely on recent polls and other studies that consistently predict Obama’s victory over McCain by more than a few percentage points. NPR’s final survey before Election Day showed Obama had a "commanding lead in battleground states and on all key elements of campaign."

First of all, it's unsettling that that journalists buy into the hype of these polls and use them as justification for their Delphic predications. This shows they're disregarding the king caveat: polls are a snap-shot in time based on a tiny sample and have a history of being incredibly wrong more than every once and a while.

But that's not the worst of it. Journalists seem to let polls affect the general tone of their coverage. In an interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer, Associate Director of Project for Excellence in Journalism Mark Jurkowitz talked about a recent study that concluded, "if a candidate is perceived to be and is seen as doing well in polls, if the strategic dynamic of the campaign is favoring him, then he tends to get better coverage." Polls are pseudo-events, given legitimacy by the media's coverage of them, but not terribly legitimate in their own right. Such questionable numbers shouldn't hold that much sway on a journalist's work.

Regardless, journalists shouldn’t be in the business of crystal balls and soothsaying anyway. Ideally, journalists serve their readership and if in an election season the press’s job is to educate the electorate so they can cast an informed vote, predictions serve absolutely no purpose. There is no sense in journalists telling the public who will win, when the public is the one who will end up making that decision.

If the news media insists on discussing the polls, why not use the opportunity to educate their audience about how best to consume and understand polls?

Does the New York Times envy The Daily Show?

***UPDATE: Using some of the scattered ideas postulated in this post, I have an article up on NYU's blog based publication NYULocal, reproduced below:

Norman Solomon’s post “Dubious Praise for The Daily Show” (Huffington Post, Sept. 10) examines the enormous amount of love the mainstream media gives to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Referencing this NYT article, Solomon labels their “elaborate praise” as “a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing” and likens them to shackled journalists watching Superman up above. Basically, he thinks The New York Times is jealous of The Daily Show. I’m beginning to agree.

I’m sure Frank Rich wishes he could be as funny as Jon Stewart, but The New York Times doesn’t seem to praise The Daily Show’s humor as much as its ability to “speak truth to power.” Here’s Solomon’s key question: What does this admiration for The Daily Show say about how The New York Times feels about its own ability to speak truth to power? In other words, why can’t straight news coverage do that?

The main difference between The New York Times and The Daily Show is that one has the obligation to be “fair and balanced” (or at least try to be), and the other does not. Solomon’s Superman comparison gets right at this point: if conventional journalists are envious of Jon Stewart’s freedom, maybe they’re fed up with being fair and balanced.

Stewart and his staff consume the same information for their stories as other reporters. One can only assume that the blatant contradictions that Stewart highlights on his show every day are just as painfully obvious to his shackled counterparts. If I were them, I’d be sick of playing dumb.

Some broadcast journalists have already outgrown their objective shells this election season: when MSNBC’s anchors Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews tried to keep it real, they were banned from anchoring the presidential campaign coverage. Now they’ve been relegated to being “commentators.”

But for a print journalist, there’s no such thing as going off script. Are broadcast/online journalists the wild-children and print the suck-ups? Solomon describes The New York Times as a “circumscribed” and “lumbering” institution, too heavy to orchestrate an agile critical assault like The Daily Show, almost as if it’s weighed down by its own brand name.

Solomon’s conclusion regarding the media? “That’s the way it goes in medialand. What isn’t conspicuous is apt to be insidious.” That’s smart-talk for, “if it ain’t obvious, it’s probably bad for you.”