Brokaw: Wait for the voters
Don Day January 9th, 2008
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.
MATTHEWS: 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.
9 Comments Add your own
1. Mike | January 9th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Bravo. Tom Brokaw for President in 2012.
2. Joe G. | January 9th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I never thought I’d seen it happen, but it’s happening: Tom Brokaw is the new Walter Cronkite.
3. Dave | January 9th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Amen. How about they just don’t report polls…
Give everyone a fair shot.
4. Hanson | January 9th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Before we canonize Tom (and I like the guy, having worked with him for a few years), let’s not forget that he’s speaking from deep experience after making a premature call on Gore in Florida back in 2000.
I watched the media self-flagellation on MSNBC and it was enough for me to turn back to CNN last night. Let’s not forget everyone got it wrong, including Obama and Clinton. I would have preferred that, instead of talking about themselves, they would have focused on what had just happened — Obama’s speech. Yes, the inaccurate polls are an issue, but that’s serious inside baseball compared to what most Americans are focused on when they’re watching these candidates.
5. Swift Loris | January 9th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Yes, “everyone got it wrong.” But Brokaw’s key words were, “trying to stampede and affect the process.” It’s one thing to report poll numbers and quite another to use them to create narratives like “The End of the Clinton Era.” There wasn’t time for that to happen in 2000; the bad call was just embarrassing. Brokaw was speaking this time of something quite different and far more insidious.
6. Frank Catalano | January 9th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Side note: Did anyone with TiVo notice that while CNN’s coverage of last night’s NH primary was properly indicated with a “(2008)” after the title in the TiVo on-screen info guide, MSNBC’s was tagged with date of “(2004)”?
Who’d have thought that MSNBC would be airing a rerun?
It was that way all evening.
7. Steve Safran | January 9th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Frank: The writers were on strike. They had to use old material.
8. discreet_chaos | January 9th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Chris Matthews wants a thorough investigation, as to why you couldn’t just call a couple of hundred people and accurately predict how tens of thousands would’ve voted.
Last night, MSNBC was an embarassment, but I watched it because it was fun to watch them squirm.
9. tdc | January 9th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
this has sego mine disaster written all over it.
‘your trusted source’ has a motto: getting it right comes in a close second to getting it first.
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