Never before has the political landscape been so hard to read and been so hard to control by the media. While they are used to being the King-Makers in most political climates, that has not been the case this cycle. And let’s hope that trend continues, because they have certainly shown they are not working for the people.
Wrong, wrong, wrong — to the very end, we got it wrong.
Just a couple of weeks ago, political prognosticators in television and print media were describing Indiana as the “most important test” for Donald J. Trump and a “firewall” where Ted Cruz “should do well.” It was one of those states Mr. Cruz could have used to force the likely — if not “guaranteed” — prospect of a contested convention in Cleveland, where, boy, were we in for a spectacular show.
Still more recently — as in Tuesday — the data journalist Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight website, gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders in Indiana. Mr. Sanders won by a comfortable margin of about five percentage points.
You can continue to blame all the wrong calls this year on new challenges in telephone polling when so many Americans — especially the young — do not have landlines and are therefore hard to track down. Or you can blame the unpredictability of an angry and politically peripatetic electorate.
But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right.
Every election cycle brings questionable news coverage. (Remember the potential president Herman Cain?) But this season has been truly spectacular in its failings. It has been “Dewey Defeats Truman” on a relentless, rolling basis. The mistakes piled up — the bad predictions, the overplaying of every slight development of the horse race to the point of whiplash, the lighthearted treatment of what turned out to be the most serious candidacy in the Republican field. The lessons learned did not.
Wednesday was a day of mea culpas from those — including Nate Cohnof The New York Times — who had declared Mr. Trump’s nomination was most likely a no-go, or who pronounced big inflection points in which the Trump candidacy would go poof, or who played up “pivotal states” that weren’t even close.
The good news is that with Mr. Trump heading for the general election, news organizations will get a second chance to rethink how they approach the race still to come and see how they can avoid the problems of the primaries.