MSM Time Versus Blog Time

John Podhoretz has an interesting take on the difference in how the mainstream media is reporting the upcoming election, and how bloggers are looking at it. First, the MSM:

If your clock's set to Mainstream Media Time, you believe for a certainty that the Democrats are poised to win 20 to 40 seats in the House of Representatives, thereby taking control of that body for the first time in 12 years. You also think Democrats are on the cusp of winning six Senate seats to take control of that chamber as well.

Those of you on Mainstream Media Time believe the American people are fed up with Republicans, that GOP voters are depressed and won't turn out and Democrats are loaded for bear and will go to the polls even if five feet of snow fall on Election Day.

Your evidence is largely made up of poll data indicating wild discontent with Congress, with Democrats posing severe challenges to scores of Republican incumbents while Republicans are hardly nipping at any Democratic incumbents' heels.

And now, the bloggers:

If your clock is set to Blog Time, you believed all that at the start of last week. By last Thursday, however, those of you on Blog Time began to discern a change: Suddenly, things weren't quite so bad for Republicans or quite so great for Democrats.

Blog Timers adduced this not from major evidence, like big polls, but from small data points - trees rather than forests.

Blog Timers noted a Maryland poll indicating a tie in the Senate race there, a seat Democrats are counting on. In Tennessee, they saw Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford deciding to confront his GOP rival, Bob Corker, at a Corker event - and for the first time in a long and confident campaign, looking desperate and worried.

After two weeks in which the news of Republican Rep. Mark Foley's disgusting instant-message shenanigans appeared to be threatening Republican House members all over the place, Blog Timers noted that polls seemed to flip back toward the GOP in some cases - e.g., Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, a senior official of his party now in the race of his life upstate.

Who's right? Even Podhoretz admits he has no idea and nobody will know until election night. However, bloggers have a pretty good, if short, track record:

If the bloggers get it right this time, this really will be yet another crisis point for Mainstream Media Time - a point at which their most loyal consumers will be compelled to wonder why they're bothering to pay attention to writers and editors whose sense of America is so completely out of whack. Especially if there is another force out there that ate the mainstream media's lunch.

If, however, the bloggers are getting it wrong, this will be the first major blow in their wildly successful rush this decade to dominate the way political news is made, reported and consumed.

Given the MSM's history of exit polling in the past two presidential elections, and the wishful thinking which seems to dominate the MSM's anti-Republican bias, I'm guessing the bloggers will be much more accurate than the MSM.