Salon gets all high and mighty in a piece titled The Punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders in 2008. This is pretty rich, given that Salon is basically made up of...pundits.
During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House?
It's essentially a narrative of concepts and ideas that, in hindsight, look pretty foolish, but this election cycle has been transformative in many ways, and I don't necessarily fault the pundits and talking heads for missing the mark. Risk taking and breaking new ground in the various media outlets has not been a keystone of their offering for the last 10 years or so - it's all been about talking points and on regurgitating inane phrases, all the while abdicating their responsibility to probe and question the power structure and provide common citizens with facts and truth that we can use to push accountability.
Wow - nice little ranting paragraph there, Kev.
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