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Nick Beaudrot begs MSNBC for mercy:
there's no sense in writing the postgame spin so quickly (MSNBC's sub-head: "At end of debate, there is little evidence of a shift in course of campaigns"). Reactions will play out over the next few days. Perhaps Clinton being stymied by two male moderators and a male opponent will play well with women. Perhaps her performance played so poorly that Obama will win Ohio and Texas by five or more points. Perhaps the fact that Obama is campaigning eighteen hours a day and thus unable to follow events in Russia will make people have second thoughts about his foreign policy chops. Perhaps they'll resent the whole exercise and just not vote. We just don't know the answer to these questions, and we won't know until post-debate polls come out on Friday or so. Just let the thing play out!What's so interesting about the insta-headline is its honesty. The proof MSNBC is using to say "there is little evidence of a shift in course of campaigns" is that their anchors don't think the debate mattered. Imagine the headline if, directly after the debate, Matthews had gone on the air and said, "holy shit, Clinton kicked his ass!" But instead he declared it a "low-scoring game" and so we're told, deflatingly, that the debate didn't matter. The media works like an assembly line: the pundits create the narrative, then the reporters report the narrative, then the pundits use the reporting (and interview the reporters) as evidence that the narrative exists.
