Tom Brokaw schools Chris Matthews on appropriate punditry.

Tom Brokaw, somewhat of an elder statesmen of television news, may have said it best on MSNBC around 11 p.m. As Mr. Olbermann’s co-anchor Chris Matthews commented on faulty New Hampshire polls, Mr. Brokaw pointed to a larger fault shared by media organizations, suggesting that journalists should “temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding:”

MATTHEWS: We’re going to have to go back and figure out the methodology, I think, on some of these.

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to go back and do? Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: What do we do then in the days before balloting–

BROKAW: What a novel idea–

MATTHEWS: –We must stay home then I guess.

BROKAW: No, no, we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today what moved them to vote. We can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that had not been fully explored in all this.

But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed and trying to stampede and affect the process.

Look, I’m not picking just on us. It’s part of the culture in which we live these days.
But I think the people out there are going to begin to make some judgments about us, if they haven’t already, if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases as we learned in New Hampshire, as they went into the polling place today or in the past three days. They were making decisions very late.

Brokaw is obviously correct. There is this new kind of punditry that is so rabid and over the top that it has the effect of actually altering how people may vote.

Nobody likes to be told what they are going to do before even they have decided for themselves.

And Chris Matthews along with the FOX News talking heads are some of the worst offenders in this category. Matthews especially dislikes the Clinton's with such obvious venom that his judgement is virtually of no use when it comes to predicting Hillary's Presidential bid. He will never give her a break and that is why MSNBC needs to take him off of the desk with Keith Olbermann and put him in one of those second tier desks with Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson.

I am certainly no Hillary fan, so let's not make people feel the need to defend her. Let her own personality, both aggressive and entitled, sink her campaign.

If Barack continues to be Barack, and Hillary continues to be Hillary, the outcome is really not in doubt.