As noted earlier, the emerging media consensus is it’s likely President Barack Obama will squeeze out a victory in tomorrow’s vote. But the Daily Beast’s Howard Hurtz notes that this lady has not sung yet — so what if the media’s narrative turns out to be plain wrong?
We still have to go through the ritual of holding the election on Tuesday, but the media’s forecasters have placed their bet, and the overwhelming consensus is that the president will win a second term.
As the candidates again raced to the swing states where the election will be decided, and as parts of New York and New Jersey remained crippled by Hurricane Sandy, the unmistakable message emanating from the press was that Mitt Romney had fallen short.
A variety of prognosticators in The Washington Post’s Outlook section picked the president to prevail, from The Fix columnist Chris Cillizza to Mad Money maven Jim Cramer (who ludicrously said Obama would capture 400 electoral votes. Stick to stocks, Cramer). The only exceptions were Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez and—for what it’s worth—Andrew Beyer, the paper’s horse-racing columnist.
But Obama is being depicted as a couple of lengths ahead in that race even in the straight-news coverage. The Post’s front-page story Sunday said that “President Obama holds a narrow advantage over Mitt Romney in the crucial contest for the electoral votes needed to win the White House.”
He details development, polls, some possible variables that could change the emerging consensus and then gets to his key point:
If Obama somehow manages to lose, it will be a stunning defeat for the nation’s first African-American president. But it will also be a crushing blow for the punditocracy that headed into Election Day filled with confidence that Obama had it in the bag. And Fox News won’t let the mainstream media hear the end of it.
And, indeed, between now and the time the voters are all counted it is important to remember:
This lady has not sung yet..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.