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Michael Grunwald:
The media will try to preserve the illusion of a toss-up; you'll keep seeing 'Obama Leads, But Voters Have Concerns' headlines. But when Democrats are winning blood-red congressional districts in Mississippi and Louisiana, when the Republican president is down to 28 percent, when the economy is tanking and world affairs keep breaking Obama's way, it shouldn't be heresy to recognize that McCain needs an improbable series of breaks. Analysts get paid to analyze, and cable news has airtime to fill, so pundits have an incentive to make politics seem complicated. In the end, though, it's usually pretty simple.That's not to say McCain can't win. The polls remain relatively close, and events have a funny way of disrupting even the most elegant plans. But the fundamentals of the election massively favor Barack Obama. The media, however, needs a competitive election in order to retain viewer interest. So they'll spend a lot of time overhyping stories that make this look like a close race, and refusing to say that McCain is extremely far behind in almost all metrics. This is the problem with a press whose prime directive is turning a profit rather than reporting the news: Sometimes reality isn't very profitable. And so it needs to be made sexier.
