There are lots of things wrong with the media. We hear about it every day from columnists, pundits, intellectuals, radicals and even from the media themselves – as if that weren’t more than slightly ironic.

Perhaps the most entertaining thing about the news media in an election year, however, is just that – their wrongness. Iowans and New Hampshirites in particular have a tendency to pride themselves on showing network commentators for what they really are: not experts with some special insight into events and crystal balls under their news desks, but, just as the rest of us, simple bystanders to an election in which the frontrunner is becoming less obvious by the day or hour.

Indeed, especially among television news outlets, there seems to be this obsession – built upon polls and “political insights” – with needing to “know” the ending before they know the ending. Think “Dewey Defeats Truman” in 1948, or the mind-blowing number of times that Florida belonged to Gore, then Bush, then Gore again on Nov. 7, 2000.

This leads to one of the most ubiquitous vocabulary words on television on any given caucus, primary or election night: “projected.” New anchors, commentators and the statisticians who – or so we’re told – back them up love to “project” winners. Why not just wait and find out who the actual winner is, instead of “projecting” it? Waiting until the next morning to find out who won New Hampshire or South Carolina or Michigan is definitely not going to hurt anyone.

Naturally, as soon as a winner is “projected,” the camera turns to the commentators again, and we hear in minute detail a post-mortem of what caused, say, Hillary Clinton’s “upset victory” over Barack Obama in New Hampshire. This is followed by a virtual dissertation on whether Clinton can carry the female vote in South Carolina, whether the black vote will swing it to Obama, and whether Mitt Romney’s connections in Michigan can carry the state for him. Mind you, their post-mortem of those primaries will probably be nothing like their predictions.

What then, of the polls – those wonderous, magical, all-knowing and omnipotent instruments of extrapolation that allow the omniscient pollsters and commentators to make their predictions?

Just two days prior to New Hampshire’s primary, Gallup had all but crowned Obama the winner in New Hampshire, showing him with a 13-point lead over Clinton. CNN had him up by 9 points. He lost by 3 percent.

It’s not much of a stretch for a sixth-grade math class to be more accurate than that.

At the very heart of the issue here is what separates the great newsmen of last century – names like Murrow, Cronkite, Brinkley and, some would say, Brokaw – from the newsmen of today. In the era of the Kennedys, Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis, America craved news – accurate, responsible news, without overtones, interpolations, extrapolations or commentary. Parading Pat Buchanan or James Carville across your newscast or election coverage does not qualify as objective journalism.

That’s not to say this is an indictment of the entire news industry. Indeed, it is often the case that some news outlets, especially the more established ones, often shy away from the intentionally sensationalized broadcasts of some of their more provocative counterparts (generally found on cable).

The net effect of all this is to somehow taint the results of the very elections they try to resist. Who’s to say how many people, seeing a growing trend toward a candidate in the polls leading up to a primary or election, decide to vote for that candidate based solely on those polls? Who’s to say how many women voted against Hillary Clinton simply because there was an expectation on the part of the commentators that they would vote for her? Who in this country isn’t sick of hearing Barack Obama referred to as the “black man running for president” instead of just “a man running for president”?

The commentators, pollsters, pundits and even the newsmen and producers at the news outlets would do an immeasurable service to their country if they would simply heed the advice of veteran newsman Tom Brokaw on New Hampshire’s primary night.

“We all need to take a deep breath and calm down.”

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in management from Orient.