Now we blame the Internet for getting New Hampshire wrong?

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Over the past 10 days, print and broadcast media have tried to blame the pollsters, the campaigns, and even the voters for their own failure to read Hillary Clinton’s overwhelming victory in New Hampshire. Now, scrambling for someone or something—anything!—to blame, some in the media have turned on political bloggers, the very couch potatoes they depend on to feed them story ideas and sound bites for their CNN appearances. Writing in the Boston Phoenix, for instance, Steven Stark tried to make the case that it was bloggers who caused the miscue in New Hampshire. I figured there must be something to his argument, because the story got a prominent link on Jim Romenesko’s popular media blog at the Poynter Institute’s Web site. Romenesko’s site is the ultimate legitimizer of media self-criticism.

Then I read it. Stark begins by bemoaning the “constant candidate debates” that have taken place this cycle. Regular Americans, he asserts, aren’t tuning in. Stark says the debates, “have been watched by virtually no one but those directly involved with the process.” There’s a fair argument to be made that the debates this cycle have been poorly moderated and have been lacking in substance. But it’s just not true that Americans aren’t watching them. The pre-primary New Hampshire debates topped the television ratings, pulling 9.36 million viewers for the Democrats and 7.35 million for the GOP. November’s CNN/YouTube Republican debate had 4.49 million viewers. These numbers are a “sea change,” Variety has noted, from 2004, when viewership was considerably lower.

Stark goes on to lament, “Internet commentators also write obsessively about polls, which, besides being zealously inaccurate (as we’ve once again discovered), are only a picture of a moment of time that is, of course, not the one that counts on Election Day.” Of course polls capture only a moment in time. That’s the whole point, and it’s why they are constantly updated. As for obsessing over them, there are really only two ways to measure the horserace in the run up to an election day. One is observation—actually attending the rallies and the pancake breakfasts and talking to voters—and trying to gauge for yourself how the momentum of a race is trending. But no journalist, no media organization can be everywhere at once. That’s why we rely on polls. (Campaigns do the same, incidentally, and it’s important to note that Hillary’s own internal polls also failed to predict her win in the Granite State.)

As for polls being “zealously inaccurate,” let’s not get carried away. If you’ve ever worked in politics, you know that’s not really true. Are they always right? No. But in Iowa, for instance, the polls were spot on. And the same pollsters who got the Democratic race in New Hampshire wrong got the GOP race there right. “Zealously inaccurate”? Hardly.

Mostly, though, I’m just not sure what people like Stark expect from the blogosphere. His real beef seems to be with the fact that despite all the coverage, “Not one [blogger] that I can find came even close to reporting that Hillary Clinton had a chance to win.” For those of us who were actually in New Hampshire and blogging the race, not opining from our arm chairs, predicting a Hillary win would have meant denying everything we were seeing on the ground. The momentum for Barack Obama. The massive crowds at his events. We would have had to have chucked it all out the window, along with the polls that got Iowa right. That’s an unrealistic standard to hold any journalist to.

Were the polls in New Hampshire wrong? On the Democratic side, you bet. But let’s talk about the meaningful reasons why. Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, for one, has offered some thoughtful analysis. We need more in that vein. Blaming it all on the Internet, though, smacks of the same laziness and failure of creativity Stark is so quick to levy against the bloggers.