The National Interest

A look at the absurd pronouncements of the political class from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. Why do pundits get to be wrong all the time?From the May/June 2008 issue of The National Interest.

THE RECORD of the American pundit class with regard to the 2008 presidential election can be summarized in one word: wrong. For the last twelve months, political journalists in unison have created and then imposed countless predictive narratives onto their “news” coverage of the campaign, narratives which have repeatedly turned out to be completely inaccurate. Yet they never learn their lesson, are never held accountable and virtually never acknowledge their errors. Political punditry is the ultimate accountability-free profession.

It is not merely opinionists who have spun these predictive tales, but so-called straight reporters as well. Indeed, dominating the media’s news coverage of presidential campaigns are claims about what is likely to happen in the future. Rather than focusing on the candidates’ records, the validity of their positions or the truth of their factual assertions, political election coverage instead is obsessed primarily with the question of who is likely to win and lose. Like most fortune-tellers, reporters’ fixation on predictive narratives has left a virtually unbroken string of humiliating errors.

Throughout all of 2007, without a single vote having been cast, two themes dominated the media’s coverage of the race. First, Hillary Clinton’s nomination was essentially inevitable; her lead in the polls was insurmountable, and her organizational strength rendered her invulnerable to any challenges. Second, John McCain’s candidacy was over, killed by campaign mismanagement, conservative anger over his immigration stance, independent resentment over his support for the “surge,” a lack of funds and Rudy Giuliani’s bulging popular lead.

Yet suddenly, by the end of January 2008, after just a few weeks of voting in a handful of small states, Barack Obama and John McCain were declared to be the all-but-certain nominees. Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were but failed afterthoughts. Within a matter of a few short weeks, the yearlong pundit script was instantaneously rewritten—just scrapped—with barely any acknowledgment that it ever existed.

Coddled, well-compensated national journalists view elections as a fun game—something about which they gossip with one another, constantly reinforcing their own groupthink biases—but not as anything that truly matters. By stark contrast, the average voter, faced with increasing economic insecurity and concerns over a whole variety of pressing problems, actually believes that important matters are at stake, that the outcome of elections can profoundly affect their futures and their families. It is little wonder that reporters are so woefully inept at predicting the voting behavior of people with whom they have virtually nothing in common.

The vast gap between the prevailing journalistic narrative and reality has extended to virtually every predictive story line, large and small, and encompasses everything from foreign- and domestic-policy debates to national elections. A favorite tactic with virtually every pundit is to take whatever their own personal opinion happens to be, preface it with the phrase “Americans believe” or “most Americans think,” and then appoint themselves Spokesman for the American People. Even worse, while they cast themselves as the mouthpiece of the Silent, Noble American Majority, it just so happens that “Americans” now overwhelmingly reject their belief system.

Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times is an especially prominent pundit who favors this tactic. In one such moment where he channeled the voice of the “American People,” Brooks proclaimed that their greatest hope was to continue to rule the world—and particularly the Middle East—with the United States’ mighty, dominant military power:

Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world. . . .
This is not a country looking to avoid entangling alliances. This is not a country renouncing the threat of force. This is not a country looking to come home again. The Iraq syndrome is over before it even had a chance to begin.

So, according to Brooks, this is just “another chapter in [America’s] long expansionist story.” And think twice if you presume the Iraq experience is going to prevent a U.S. attack on Iran. Americans still crave the “dominant role in the world.”

But let us not be fooled into thinking he really speaks for the American people. Oddly enough, there’s a way to find out. It’s called “polling data.” I can happily point out that we hear nary a whisper of these facts in Brooks’s piece and his oft-repeated claims about what Americans think are purely false. Neoconservative fantasies aside, military adventures are increasingly repudiated by Americans. A Pew poll of early February 2006 states:

When President Bush delivered a strong warning against isolationism in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he was speaking to a recent and dramatic turn in public opinion. A recent Pew Research survey found a decided revival of isolationist sentiment among the public, to levels not seen since [the] post-Cold War 1990s and the post-Vietnam 1970s. Moreover, one of the main pillars of Bush’s argument in favor of global engagement—the need to promote democracy around the world—has not struck a chord with the public. Support for that objective has been consistently tepid, even among members of Bush’s own party.

Particularly, the idea that the United States should topple foreign governments and “spread freedom” is pretty much as marginalized as you can get:

Of thirteen foreign policy priorities tested in Pew’s October [2005] survey, “promoting democracy in other nations” came in dead last. . . . And in contrast with public opinion on most foreign policy questions these days, there is no partisan divide—Republicans and Democrats agree. . . .

We see an offshoot of this phenomenon with the venerable Howard Kurtz of CNN/Washington Post, who has a tendency to recycle stories from the right-wing blogosphere, passing them off as what America needs to know. With what seems to be a little jig, he recites the emerging Beltway wisdom that—gasp!—we just might be winning in Iraq. And that just might hurt the Democrats in the election.

But hope against Howard-Kurtz hope, people just don’t seem to be changing their minds. Yet again, polling data released a couple of days after Kurtz’s article of November 6, 2007, this time from CNN, showed that overall, 68 percent of Americans were opposed to the war in Iraq—a new record. And again devastating to Brooks’s point, 63 percent opposed air strikes on Iran. That number jumped up to 73 when we talk about adding ground troops to a military adventure.

But Brooks, Kurtz, the Politico’s Jim VandeHei, David Broder and Shailagh Murray at the Washington Post, and others still promise that this is all going to work out. Pundits like these love to pretend that they are free of political opinion and bias and instead masquerade as Spokesmen for the People, attributing to those People the views which the pundits themselves harbor but will not acknowledge. Time and again, this self-centered, self-referential method for opining about political matters produces claims and predictions which are dead wrong.

And these relentlessly inaccurate predictions were unending in the weeks prior to the first nationwide vote, the January 3 Iowa caucus; polls almost unanimously showed an increasingly large lead for the former GOP governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. For months, the press had ignored Huckabee as an irrelevant also-ran, and the surge of support reflected by these polls—coming from the state’s large evangelical voter block—was predicted by virtually none of the pundits.

As Huckabee’s increased polling strength brought him more media attention, he committed a series of what journalists refer to as “gaffes”—mistakes that, in the eyes of the pundit class, reflected what a terribly unsophisticated candidate he was, a mere “rookie” unfamiliar with the time-tested Beltway rules for how a candidate should behave. Each time Huckabee violated one of their sacred principles, journalists insisted with great certainty that the latest gaffe would harm Hucakabee’s prospects in Iowa. Yet Huckabee’s lead continued to grow as a result of the evangelical voters who were completely indifferent to the petty insider mistakes on which the pundit class was so fixated.

Huckabee’s most scorn-inducing “mistake” occurred during a late-December press conference held just before the Iowa caucus. He announced his campaign had produced a negative ad aimed at his rival, Mitt Romney, but that he, Huckabee, had insisted it not be used. Nonetheless, Huckabee showed the ad to reporters then and there—a move which journalists covering the Iowa race, with virtual unanimity, condemned as a nakedly cynical and unsophisticated ploy to reap the benefits of quashing a negative ad while, at the same time, ensuring its circulation by showing it to reporters at the press conference.

To the oh-so-knowing national press, this process mistake was not merely embarrassing, but would be fatal to Huckabee’s campaign. One after the next—like a flock of birds parroting each other—they pronounced Huckabee’s campaign mortally wounded by this grave error.

“That sound you hear rumbling out of Des Moines appears to be a monumental implosion,” intoned Time’s Joe Klein the next day, in an item he entitled “Huckabust.” The Politico’s Mike Allen wrote, “The national political press corps . . . had a harmonic convergence yesterday on a single point: Huckabee lost it at his news conference yesterday.” Allen’s Politico colleague, Jonathan Martin, echoed, “Huckabee has found himself under the unforgiving glare of the front-runner’s spotlight, and his hopes to win here have now become severely threatened by it.”

A mere two days after Huckabee’s Iowa media obituary was written, the caucus was held. Huckabee, with 34 percent of the vote, crushed all of his opponents, including the far-better-funded and -organized former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, and the yearlong front-runner, Rudy Giuliani. What national journalists were so certain was such a significant, even fatal, event—Huckabee’s comments about the negative ad—could not have been of any less importance to Iowa voters. The gap between the perceptions of the pundit class and ordinary voters could scarcely be any larger or more self-evident.

Following Iowa, journalists had a new, universally embraced story line: Barack Obama’s Iowa win and large polling lead in the next state, New Hampshire, meant that his nomination had become inevitable, while the prior “inevitable” nominee, Hillary Clinton, was now destined to fail. Four days later, Clinton won New Hampshire, and that script, too, was instantly scrapped. In the wake of the New Hampshire press debacle, the Politico was one of the very few American news outlets to acknowledge just how continuously wrong the media has been, as John Harris and Jim VandeHei published a candid mea culpa documenting the press’s yearlong string of failures.

The Politico duo noted that the loser in New Hampshire was not only Obama but also “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.” Itemizing the countless number of factually false predictive story lines the American press had manufactured throughout the year, they continued:

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.

The admission of systematic error from Harris and VandeHei is notable because of how rare it is. Reporters virtually never acknowledge just how wrong their predictive claims turn out to be. While the New Hampshire error was too blatant to ignore completely—television and print reporters spent days telling their audience that Obama’s victory was certain only to watch as Clinton won—most ended up dismissively blaming the pollsters for their mistakes, rather than acknowledging, let alone meaningfully discussing, the fundamental flaws in their coverage that have produced this deeply embarrassing record of wrongness.

And so we come back again to the Iraq War and more recent wrongheaded predictions. In their never-ending hope that Americans will begin to support the McCain position on Iraq, the Politico published a blatantly one-sided article, authored by David Paul Kuhn and citing the now-infamous Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution:

The uptick in public support is a promising sign for Republican candidates who have been bludgeoned over the Bush administration’s war policies. But no candidate stands to gain more than McCain.

But on the very same day, a USA Today/Gallup poll was released, showing—surprise, surprise—that 60 percent of Americans wanted to “set a timetable for removing troops and stick to it regardless of what is going on in Iraq.” And that runs pretty much contrary to the McCain position.

As a general matter, there is no reason whatsoever why reporters—as opposed to pundits—ought to be infusing predictions into their reporting at all. Predicting the future is a completely inappropriate role for political reporters to play, yet it composes virtually the entirety of their election coverage. If one reads Time or the New Republic or the Politico or the Washington Post, one is hard-pressed to find any examples of straight-factual reporting about the remaining candidates, their positions, anything substantive—as opposed to endless, groupthink gossip about tactics and campaigns and winning/losing “horse race” predictions. The distinction between reporters and opinionists—particularly when it comes to campaign reporting—has been eroded almost completely, so that reporters now act as though they are commentators whose principal role it is, clairvoyantlike, to declare who will likely win and lose.

Beyond the deviation by journalists from the basic parameters of fact reporting, it has become increasingly clear that the traveling press corps following the various candidates lives in an insular, segregated, profoundly out-of-touch bubble. The way they think about campaigns and elections could not be any further removed from how elections are perceived by the storied “average voter,” on whose behalf the press corps absurdly fantasizes they speak.

For virtually all of 2007—with the first vote still months away—most ordinary voters paid little attention to the presidential campaign. As a result, the front-runner status of Clinton and Giuliani—like that of Joe Lieberman in 2004—was clearly a by-product of nothing more significant than superior name recognition, a fact which the politically obsessed reporters were incapable of recognizing.

While the causes for this humiliating record of wrongness can be reasonably debated, its magnitude cannot be. Virtually every predictive pronouncement from the pundit class over the last year has been demonstrably and factually false. Yet the same pundits continue with the same behavior based on the same methods, never paying any price for their deeply flawed record. Being a pundit means never having to say you are sorry, or even admit that you are wrong. You just move seamlessly to the next story line, ignoring your past record of fundamental mistakes as though it never happened.

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist at Salon and author of Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (Crown, 2008).