Adam H. Johnson is an analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. He is on Twitter.

Who is and isn’t a “serious” candidate in our modern public relations-driven democracy is largely tautological. Whoever the news media say is important early on typically becomes the most important. This leads to a feedback loop that anoints the “frontrunner” in the “invisible primary,” where success is measured by name recognition, money raised, party insider support and a host of “serious” accomplishments, all before the most essential of feedback has been provided: actual voting.

Downplay the 'invisible primary,' which measures success by name recognition, donations, insider support and 'serious' accomplishments.

This dynamic helped create the artificial consensus around Hillary Clinton early on. According to one tally of nightly broadcast network news during the 2015 primary season, Sanders received a total of 20 minutes of coverage, compared to Clinton’s 121 minutes and Trump’s 327. This gap would narrow once Sanders began to gain parity in early primary states, a feat Sanders achieved not because of media coverage but despite it.

That “frontrunner” status prejudices both viewer and pundit alike when news media presents delegate totals, often including the unearned “super delegates,” despite the fact that their declared preferences are not binding, and could only reverse the will of the voters at the risk of throwing the election. This makes it appear as if Clinton’s lead is more insuperable than it actually is — a vestige of the invisible primary that occurred months before anyone voted.

The rise of predictive metrics, or “data-driven” analysis, has also been something of a false prophet. When both The Observer and The Washington Post addressed the question of Sanders’ media coverage, they insisted he was getting the appropriate amount because professional tea-leaf readers FiveThirtyEight.com, along with PredictIt, a site allowing the public to gamble on the outcome of the race, gave him very low odds. What’s missing from this analysis is that these indicators, while sometimes useful, are simply quantifying conventional wisdom, not proving any unique insight into future events. It's a conventional wisdom that’s just as informed by the “frontrunner” mystique as any other indicator.

To combat frontrunner bias — and give a truer sense of the strength of an insurgent like Bernie Sanders — the news media should do its best to downplay the importance of the invisible primary until the actual ones have gotten underway.



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