In the days before the [Super Tuesday] voting . . . an extraordinary amount of good press rained down on Barack Obama. And no network has done more to push absurdly over-the-top story-lines favorable to Obama than MSNBC has.
The network took the lead in pumping the Ted Kennedy endorsement into an event of truly cosmic significance. Chris Matthews repeatedly hailed Obama as a kind of cross between Jesus, JFK, and Muhammad Ali. One commentator after another predicted that Bill Clinton's antics would mortally wound Hillary's candidacy. In a perfect set-up to the pratfall that followed, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson went on MSNBC and flatly predicted that last night's results would be a "repudiation of Bill Clinton." Like, not.
. . . Tom Brokaw went on MSNBC and chastised his colleagues for getting so far ahead of themselves. “Once again,” Brokaw intoned, “in all of our conventional and collective wisdom, we were wrong.” Taylor Marsh rightly noted that Brokaw was "babysitting" his MSNBC colleagues.
. . . The results repudiated the style of punditry that MSNBC traffics in, perhaps more so than any other network this cycle -- the constant speculation, the borderline-pathological obsession with Bill Clinton, the embarrassing Obama worship, the refusal to let the voters have their say.
What will make MSNBC -- and like-minded colleagues -- stop with this stuff? At this point, multiple journalistic worthies have pleaded for sanity. Brokaw did this just last night. . . . Maybe the MSNBC folks and others like them can be induced to stop this sort of stuff for Obama's sake?
As I say, any honest observer should see this. The Clinton campaign is completely right here. Keith Olbermann and Company have become a variant of the Fox Noise he so often likes to ridicule.