Outraged by the media (short form version)

In exit polls in New Hampshire, conducted jointly by the major media outlets, was this outrageous question: "Regardless of how you voted today, do you think that Howard Dean has the temperment to be President?" Curiously, there were no similarly specific questions about any other candidates. Columbia Journalism Review takes incredible exception to this question, and takes to task the lame excuse that since it was exit polling, it couldn't have affected the election results. Which, as CJR points out, would be true if there weren't voters in 48 other states who haven't had a chance to vote in primaries yet. [link]

And remember Howard Dean's "scream heard 'round the world"? After more carefully reviewing it, Diane Sawyer now realizes that in fact, the media may have misplayed the whole story and that Dean's scream may not have even been heard 'round the room. Turns out, Dean was shouting to be heard over the crowd, but was shouting into a handheld microphone, which happened to be the audio feed that the networks used.

Here's what Sawyer had to say [link]:

"After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise [...]

So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage[...]

Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd. And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd."

Then she asked the other major networks to comment. Here's what they had to say:

CBS News: "Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is -- it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers." -- Andrew Heyward, President - CBS News

ABC News: "It's always a danger that we'll use good video too much." -- David Westin, President - ABC News

CNN: "We've all been wrestling with this. If we had it to do over again, we'd probably pull ourselves back." -- Princell Hair, General Manager - CNN

Fox News: "It got overplayed a bit, and the public clearly thought that, too, and kept him alive for another round." -- Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO - Fox News

So I ask, where's to wall-to-wall coverage of the media's latest major-league screw-up? Or the public apologies from Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS?

I mean, really, despite Roger Ailes's claim of no-harm no-foul, after the media orgy, Dean was barely breathing, and has been struggling to recover ever since. Between that and the NH exit-polling question, is it really unfair to accuse the media of having a bias against Dean? I don't think it is.