With Iowa in the rear-view mirror, media writers recapped the night of Iowa caucus coverage to see who came out on top. And just as the Iowa caucus means for the general election, there’s no clear winner.
Neil Justin of the Minneapolis Star Tribune accused both Fox News and CNN of spending too much time, “talking to themselves,” although he did say FNC, “provided a little more beef.” He also described Wolf Blitzer as, “the ringmaster of a circus of graphics and charts that looked like they were rented from some geometry fun house.”
What anchor best encompasses the Iowa caucus? Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times writes it’s MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “If Tim Russert of NBC News is the New Hampshire primary of political pundits — crucial, serious and august — then his colleague Chris Matthews, intense, voluble and unavoidable, is the Iowa caucuses,” she writes.
The AP’s David Bauder praised the Fox News crawl, which displayed election results and related news items, while deriding the hasty predictions made by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin.
Meanwhile, Marketwatch.com’s Jon Friedman thinks everybody lost. “Once again, TV has taken the easy way out by focusing on the candidates’ personalities instead of hammering on the issues. The pundits keep telling us that this is the most interesting, wide-open and important election of modern times, yet we keep getting the same old insufficient coverage,” he writes.