Howling at the South Carolina press coverage

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is on the Establishment press' case over the coverage of the South Carolina primary results in RACE CARDS! Was Bill Clinton playing a card? We don’t know—but the press corps sure has been 01/28/08:

One quick point about Saturday’s primary: The election results differed massively from the pre-election polling. But then, this also happened in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, and in the 2000 New Hampshire primary on the Republican side. Translation: For various reasons, it’s hard to poll primaries. (Turn-out rates are hard to predict, to cite just one problem.) But only in New Hampshire 2008 did the press corps scream and yell about the deeply-troubling polling "error" — and when they did, they played the race card, as they have aggressively done all through the past month. (More below.) As always, Chris Matthews was most reprehensible, disgracefully saying that “ten to fifteen percent” of New Hampshire Democrats had "lied" to pollsters for racial reasons. But the press corps’ racial spinning was widespread and as always, it was quite incoherent. (my emphasis)

I had dinner with my main demographics guru last night, who confirmed that it's well-known that polls are not nearly as precise in primaries as in general elections. I've assumed this for a long time, to the point that I was mystified when the punditocracy went into a tither about how shocking it was that the New Hampshire polling could have been wrong. Having had a much larger than average dose of CNN the last couple of days, a lot of these talking heads probably had no idea that polls were notoriously fluid in primary contests, especially one with multiple candidates. Because they're too sloppy to care, much less actually research it before blathering it on TV.

Somerby's post is also a strong reminder that the problem with these things is not just the Republican partisans or FOX News. It's the mainstream press and also some careless liberal Democratic partisans who really ought to know better.

Here's Somerby's take on the intensely-analyzed Bill Clinton remark on Jesse Jackson, which of all of his remarks took the least amount of furious comma-dancing to make it sound somehow racial:

In our view, Bill Clinton did a very dumb thing when he made that “Jesse Jackson” remark. Indeed, the incident made us think that Dems might be better off trying to start anew with Obama. In a rational world, we’d be inclined to favor Hillary Clinton over Obama as the best person to be the next president. But this isn’t a rational world, and Bill Clinton’s conduct got so clumsy this week that the scales began to tip as we considered out upcoming vote.

That said, was Bill Clinton “playing the race card” when he made this ballyhooed statement? Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum have both judged that he was. For ourselves, we’d be careful before we reached such a punishing judgment. Although we’re not sure that it matters, given the dumbness of Clinton’s remark.

Somerby goes into much more detail about why he thinks Clinton's Jesse Jackson statement was not good. Definitely worth reading.

His post is a reminder that critical thinking, careful listening and careful reading are possible for us mere mortals, even if it's sometimes difficult. Especially with a broken "press corps" like ours to rely on for news.

Tags: bob somerby, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press