Media Criticism

After a year of active campaigning and endless hours spent on my part watching stump speeches, we have finally reached the end of the Iowa caucuses. The lesson I learned from the 2008 Iowa caucuses was that I should have paced my excitement about politics of change. The Iowa caucuses, after all, represent a few hundred thousand individuals who were able to convince one another to side with a few top tier candidates. I have little energy left for New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and beyond.

MSNBC and CNN have assisted in this political fatigue. I turned on MSNBC this morning and there was a caucus ticker with nearly 10 hours left until the first caucuses started. My addiction to coverage of presidential politics led me to watch talking heads like Joe Scarborough, Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews speak at length about the same topics for half a day. Aside from siding with Pat Buchanan on his projection of the caucus results, I got little out of this all-day coverage.

There was a beacon of hope in media coverage about the Iowa caucuses. I know dozens of people watch C-SPAN on a daily basis but I have to believe a greater number who were interested in the caucuses watched this evening. The C-SPAN coverage began in earnest at 6:00pm Central time with a live feed of coverage by one of Iowa’s local stations. I watched a bit of the coverage of an Iowa Democratic caucus as well as the straightforward polling process on the Republican side. There weren’t aging commentators telling me what to think like the other networks. If you ever want a raw feed into politics, check out C-SPAN.

My last thought on the Iowa primaries is that these results may not matter by next Tuesday. Mike Huckabee will find it difficult to win in New Hampshire. Barack Obama has done well in New Hampshire but you better believe Clinton and Edwards will be doing a full court press to challenge him at every turn. The mainstream media may think that Obama has the overwhelming momentum and the surprising turn of Huckabee’s campaign make the next few primaries a foregone conclusion. I think that this race goes until February 5th and beyond because the momentum from one primary to the next may seem overwhelming but voters have had eight years of George W. Bush. People in the Super Tuesday states want to kick the tires a bit before they make their selection.