On Wednesday night, as I was mixing down the elements for this week's PJM Political (which you can listen to here--and yes, I did get far too silly writing the headline)--I listened to some of the audio from Rush Limbaugh, the first time I had done so in a while. As a result of Operation Chaos, he's clearly having more fun than he's had in quite some time and this essay in Slate by Jack Shafer is one of the many inadvertent byproducts of it:

My intention here is less to light a candle for the Clinton candidacy—which remains the long shot it was even after her Pennsylvania primary win in late April—than to give Russert and company the hot foot for their dramatic exuberance.

Whether covering politics, the stock market, or sports, television reporters live inside the moment, and the fundamental questions before them are always "who's winning, who's losing, and why" (which just happens to be the tag line of Slate's "Politics" department). If a TV reporter can peg a winner, he will. If no winners are in attendance, he'll identify a loser. If no winner or losers can be found, he'll drum up that somebody has "gained" momentum. The medium doesn't reward procrastinators or qualifiers.

Although TV reporters may expect thing X to happen while they're on the air, they plan for contingencies Y and Z. Before going on camera, they stuff their cheeks with a huge assortment of pithy insights so that, no matter what happens, they have something smart to mouth. The most excitable of the TV news chipmunks was usually Dan Rather, whose election night scripts—"Bush is sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field"—covered events that ultimately may have occurred only in parallel universes.

When Russert exclaimed the inevitability of Obama's nomination, it was an act of recall, not an act of cognition. At the moment he bestowed the nomination upon Obama, his network had yet to call Indiana for Clinton. Shuffling his mental notes and calculating the possibility of an Obama victory in Indiana, how could he resist speaking the words he had composed in his head two months ago?

Russert of course, a former aid to Mario Cuomo, came to NBC via the revolving door between Democrats and old media (See also: Stephanopoulos, George; and Matthews, Chris). Jeff Jarvis and James Wolcott, who have each openly declared for Hillary, have also recently clung bitterly to similar opinions. I don't know if Shafer is a Hillary or an Obama man (perhaps he's a McCain backer, but I would tend to doubt it, based on where he's writing), but when the above could have been written for National Review Online, or Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, (including its subsidiary, Newsbusters), it's been fascinating to watch the center-left turn on their own mass media, as a result of this extended primary season.