The “John McCain is dead” story line from last summer claimed that weak fundraising, poor polls, a backlash from conservatives and staff disarray had doomed his candidacy. Why reporters get it wrong

New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us.

"Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.


If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

New Hampshire was jarring because it offered in highly concentrated form all the dysfunctions and maladies that have periodically afflicted political journalism for years.

Let’s look back at some of the bogus narratives of this election so far.

There was the “John McCain is dead” story line from last summer. Weak fundraising, poor polls, a backlash from conservatives and staff disarray had doomed his candidacy.

Never mind.

Then there was Iowa. The caucuses, we wrote, are all about organization. Except they were won on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who had only the barest-bones organization.

D’oh!

Or Barack Obama. The reason his candidacy was not taking flight, as the wisdom had it last fall, was that he was preaching a bland message of unity and civility in a year when Democrats were eager for a sharper, more confrontational and more partisan message.

Guess not.

These were only appetizers to the main course of humiliation. After a barrage of coverage that all but anointed Obama as the New Hampshire winner and declared him the clear front-runner for the nomination, that exercise in groupthink was stopped cold by the actual votes.

Whoops.

Looks like we have a trend here. Our own publication, Politico, did its part in promoting several of these flimsy story lines. We used predictive language in stories. We amplified certain trends and muffled the caveat, which perhaps should be printed with every story, like a surgeon general’s warning: “We don’t know what will happen until voters vote.”

If we were trying to construct a defense, we could also point to other cases where we pushed against conventional thinking or anticipated outcomes that really did come true.

But self-defense should not be the point after a debacle this glaring. When we started Politico, we vowed to be more transparent than news organizations traditionally have been about how we do our work — and how we sometimes err. In that spirit, here are some thoughts about why this profession, supposedly devoted to depicting reality, obsesses about so many story lines that turn out to be fiction.

1. Horse race frenzy

We are addicts. Do not listen to any reporter who says otherwise. It is why reporters leave their homes, spouses and families for long stretches to cram into crummy hotels and smelly buses to cover campaigns.

The Web has made us a bit less defensive about this than we were in the past. That’s because we now have metrics — based on what stories get clicked on — that show our readers are obsessed with the horse race, too.

There is no way to cover the horse race without polls. That explains our obsession. But it does not excuse our lack of discretion. We cover polls we know to be statistically suspect, from firms we know use questionable methodology. Most of all, we treat even legitimate polls as holy writs, rather than simply snapshots of the general contours of a race.

We are not about to forswear polls. They can be astonishingly prescient, as was The Des Moines Register poll that correctly showed Obama and Huckabee surging in the days before the caucus. For that matter, most New Hampshire polling correctly predicted John McCain’s win, Mitt Romney’s close second-place finish and Huckabee’s bump to third. But no poll that we saw was anticipating Clinton’s win.

The entire profession gives polls an oracular significance that no responsible polling expert would ever agree with. Perhaps every story should come with a bold-type reminder, “This is polling, folks, not infallible data.”

But the instinct to be even a couple hours ahead of the story is relentless. At The Washington Post, where we both worked, exit polls in 2004 had the newsroom busy working on Why Kerry Won stories—scrapped just minutes before publication as real returns made clear this was not in the cards.

2. The echo chamber



Check out the nicer restaurants in Manchester, N.H., or Des Moines, Iowa, in the political season and you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it.

That is one chief reason the “Hillary is inevitable” and “Hillary is toast” narratives developed so quickly and spread so rapidly.

Take Tuesday alone as an illustration. Breakfast was at a Nashua, N.H., hotel with a political operative working for a rival campaign; the worker was explaining why it was a virtual impossibility that Hillary Clinton could recover in the remaining primaries from what we both assumed would be a severe New Hampshire defeat.

In the afternoon, there was an e-mail exchange with a network political analyst.

Politico editor, swimming very tentatively against the conventional wisdom: “I am not sure she’s through yet; ... 40 percent chance she is nominee, I think.”

Network analyst: “If she’s within 12, I agree with you. More than that, hard to see.”

That was followed by TV, where the same Politico editor went on Fox News to note that the big turnout was almost certainly a great sign for Obama.

On the way out of the studio, chatting with colleagues, came the first word of the surprising exit poll data. It’s close; looks like she might even come within 5 points or so. Hmm, interesting.

The drive back to the hotel room included cell phone calls and (dangerous) BlackBerry exchanges with Clinton operatives and other political sources, all eager to pump for and share information about what was happening and what it might mean.

There is a defense of sorts here, too. Even Clinton aides themselves started the day believing they were going to get blown out. But just because well-placed people are in the echo chamber does not mean the noise is accurate.

3. Personal bias



This one is complicated. Most reporters, in our experience, really do work hard to separate their personal feelings from their professional judgment.

But it has been tough to avoid a sense this week that some of the coverage has been shaped by journalists rooting for certain outcomes — either because they think it’s the better story or simply the one they’d prefer to see.

NBC’s Brian Williams stirred some controversy earlier in the week when he reported that his network’s correspondent covering Obama admitted it was hard to be objective covering the Illinois senator. Reporters are human, and some did seem swept up in the same emotions many voters experienced when they saw a black man win snow-white Iowa by preaching a gospel of change. Many are sympathetic to Obama’s argument that the culture of Washington politics is fundamentally broken.

McCain also benefits from the personal sentiments of reporters. Many journalists are enamored with McCain because of the access he gives and, above all, the belief that he is free of political artifice.

Hillary Clinton, cautious and scripted, got the reverse treatment. She is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media.

Many journalists rushed with unseemly haste to the narrative about the fall of the Clinton machine. On this score, reporters are recidivists. The Clintons were finished in 1992, when Bill Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign was rocked by scandal. In 1993, when Time pronounced him “The Incredible Shrinking President.” In 1994, when Hillary Clinton botched health care and Democrats lost Congress. In 1995, when Bill Clinton pleaded he still had “relevance.” In 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal sent the Clinton presidency reeling.

Hillary Clinton's comeback in New Hampshire this week probably shared a trait in common with those earlier episodes: The media frenzy itself became part of the story, contributing to a sense of piling on and making people more sympathetic to the candidate.

Things are not all bad. Politico is part of a broad, technology-inspired movement that has led to more open and more exhaustive coverage of this presidential race than ever before. A lot of that coverage is damn good. As far as what’s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think.