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Media Notes: Howard Kurtz on the Scott Brown story

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 25, 2010

 

If Martha Coakley's defeat in Massachusetts was a political earthquake, most journalists were slow to hear the tremors.

Her chances of beating an obscure Republican in the race for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat seemed so overwhelming that national news organizations largely ignored the contest until the stretch run. The mainstream media were lulled into complacency by Coakley's big lead in the polls and Massachusetts's reputation as the bluest of blue states.

"The national press, and frankly to some extent the local press, were taken by surprise," says Mark Jurkowitz, the Boston Globe's former media reporter. "The failure here was not to pick up on what was going on out there in the ether. A lot of journalists didn't know who Scott Brown was or failed to take him seriously because he was a Republican running in an overwhelmingly Democratic state," says Jurkowitz, now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

More . . .

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LOL Nice to know we were ahead of most journalists!!  LOL 

I saw her challenge very early on in the game.  Even as the Dem primaries were in progress, I was watching the GOP side candidates and saying I hope these do not pick a conservative MA version of Doug Hoffman. If they had done that, GOP side would not have won; I am quite sure of that.

Frankly, in late December, when Coakley said let's have 3 more debates, I said, you are done! That was before David Gergen posed "In Kennedy seat" question that Scott Brown hit a home run on.

Coakley got a bit too confident in this race and did not recognize her strengths and weaknesses.  She needed a greater self-assessment and modulation of the campaign from that viewpoint.

-- Edited by Sanders on Monday 25th of January 2010 09:24:03 AM