How The Mainstream Media Got The Democrats Debate All Wrong

Ed Moloney raises an eyebrow at claims that Hillary Clinton won the recent televised debate with Bernie Sanders. Ed Moloney blogs @ The Broken Elbow.


In the wake of the first Democratic television debate earlier this week, on CNN, the mainstream media, almost to a man and woman, declared Hillary Clinton the winner and a victor over her main rival, ‘democratic socialist’, Bernie Sanders.


My suspicion that this was a view fashioned by two factors – the inherent pro-establishment bias of the vast majority of the profession, as prevalent in America as it is elsewhere, and the herd instinct which drives them to congregate in large, safe groups for self-protection – appears to have been borne out by this interesting piece which has appeared on the Alternet website.

The facts, i.e. the results of focus groups and online opinion polls, show that the MSM got it badly wrong and that in the opinion of viewers watching the debate, Sanders beat Clinton nearly everywhere. But the initial media verdict has quickly assumed the status of unalterable set-in-stone fact.

A few reporters are now factoring this reality into their analysis by adding the comment that “as well Sanders did well” but the message nonetheless remains that in a contest between a centre-right Democrat with a history of war-mongering and pandering to Wall Street, and a figure who could happily take a seat in Tony Blair’s cabinet, the media will invariably plump for the former. Enjoy:

Bernie Won All the Focus Groups & Online Polls, So Why Is the Media Saying Hillary Won the Debate?


What the public wants out of a candidate and what the beltway press wants appear to be two entirely different things.

By Adam Johnson / AlterNet
October 14, 2015

 

Who “won” a debate is inherently subjective. The idea of winning a debate necessarily entails a goal to be achieved. What this goal is, therefore, says as much about the person judging its achievement as the goal itself. Pundits are ostensibly supposed to judge whether or not a candidate said what “the voters” want to hear. But what ends up happening, invariably, is they end up judging whether or not the candidate said what they think voters wanted to hear. This, after all, is why pundits exist, to act as a clergy class charged with interpreting people’s own inscrutable opinions for them. The chasm between what the pundits saw and what the public saw was even bigger than usual last night.

Bernie Sanders by all objective measures “won” the debate. Hands down. I don’t say this as a personal analysis of the debate; the very idea of “winning” a debate is silly to me. I say this because based on the only relatively objective metric we have, online polls and focus groups, he did win. And it’s not even close.

Sanders won the
CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group; in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer’s knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN, Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?

Firstly, it’s important to point out that online polls, and to a lesser extent focus groups, are obviously not scientific. But it’s also important to point out that the echo chamber musings of establishment liberal pundits is far, far less scientific. It wasn’t that the online polls and focus groups had Sanders winning, it’s that they had him winning by a lot. And it wasn’t just that the pundit class has Clinton winning, it’s that they had her winning by a lot. This gap speaks to a larger gap we’ve seen since the beginning of the Sanders campaign. The mainstream media writes off Bernie and is constantly shocked when his polls numbers go up. What explains this phenomenon? Freddie DeBoer had this to say:

This morning, I’ve been pointing out on Twitter that the unanimity of pro-Hillary Clinton journalism coming from the mouthpieces of establishment Democratic politics — Slate, Vox, New York Magazine, etc. — is entirely predictable and has no meaningful relationship to her actual performance at the debate last night. That’s because, one, the Democrats are a centrist party that is interested in maintaining the stranglehold of the DNC establishment on their presidential politics, and these publications toe that line. And second, because Clinton has long been assumed to be the heavy favorite to win the presidency, these publications are in a heated battle to produce the most sympathetic coverage, in order to gain access. That is a tried-and-true method of career advancement in political journalism. Ezra Klein was a well-regarded blogger and journalist. He became the most influential journalist in DC (and someone, I can tell you with great confidence, that young political journalists are terrified of crossing) through his rabid defense of Obamacare, and subsequent access to the President. That people would try and play the same role with Clinton is as natural and unsurprising as I can imagine.


Many establishment journalists were in a hurry to declare Clinton not just the winner of the debate, but of the party nomination. One fairly creepy exchange between Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker and Alec MacGillis summed it up nicely:





“Pretend” there’s a race? Isn’t that sort of the whole point of democracy? To have as much debate and vetting as possible before nominating a potential leader of the free world? Matt Yglesias at Vox also dismissed this entire primary process out of hand:


It’s unclear what the rush is. The first primary is months away, yet they’re ready to call it based entirely on an ad hoc analysis of one debate. This tweet by Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe perfectly sums up mainstream media’s cluelessness:




Add caption


A “protest candidate”? If Cohen hasn’t noticed, the electorate is full of piss and vinegar and rancor, which is precisely why an otherwise obscure, self-described Socialist has risen in the polls the way he has.

But the question still remains: why the rush to write off Sanders? Why the constant gap between how the public perceives Sanders and how the mainstream media does? Why, most of all, would anyone listen to the very same pundit class that was wrong in ’08 and continues to be wrong in 2015?

1 comment:

  1. It was amazing watching it. Both Sanders and Clinton did well enough, and I'd also add if Bernie was not in the race, Martin O'Malley (son of immigrants btw) would have a far higher profile. Sanders did fumble on gun control, as he tried to articulate the trouble that all the rhetoric in the world would not budge the NRA's massive lobbying in Congress. The point is, after the debate, immediately CNN"s talking heads called it for HRC. Then, they turned to the polls from the audience and focus groups. The difference was noteworthy. Whether Fox, WSJ, social media, or CNN's poll itself, all called it for Sanders, ranging from 67% to 75% for him alone. Makes you wonder.

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