This election is “make or break” for the MSM. If they can’t deliver a winner they have no influence to sell. A Romney win would be devastating to them.
Wire service journalism - AP journalism, essentially - faces a potentially critical decision. It might perhaps not be too late to back down and make bluff like they were always being even-handed in this race as Romney gallops home uncontested. Pretty much the way that pollsters hype the prospects of Democrat candidates until just before the election, then publish serious estimates of the true strength of the candidates just before the election. Or, they can double down, assuming that they have so much propaganda power that they cannot be truly at the risk of entirely jumping the shark.And based on my understanding that journalists have never learned how to even try to be objective, I would predict the latter. All they know is how to put up a Potemkin Village facade of objectivity based solely on propaganda power. They will double down the same way that Dan Rather doubled down when he was caught promoting fraudulent “Texas Air National Guard memos.”
It will be interesting to see how much of a hit their brand takes in the process. It is tempting - right, abb? - to predict a make-or break crisis, but just as Adam Smith pointed out that “There is a lot of ruin in a country,” I would suggest that journalists have an enormous reservoir of (undeserved) good will - and they will still be around after they have gotten egg all over their faces this November.