With Hillary Clinton taking – and keeping – an early lead last night in the New Hampshire primary, talk on MSNBC turned to how wrong the media swarm was in predicting the race for Barack Obama. I was watching when Tom Brokaw joined Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, and the elder statesman of TV news had some wise words (via TV Decoder):
MATTHEWS: We’re going to have to go back and figure out the methodology, I think, on some of these.
BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to go back and do? Wait for the voters to make their judgment.
AdvertisementMATTHEWS: What do we do then in the days before balloting—
BROKAW: What a novel idea—
MATTHEWS: —We must stay home then I guess.
BROKAW: No, no, we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today what moved them to vote. We can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that had not been fully explored in all this.
But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed and trying to stampede and affect the process.