Joe Conason at Salon thinks so.
Everybody has a theory about the remarkable resurgence of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. She "cried her way" to victory. Or she had a better vote-pulling operation. Or she benefited from a "Bradley effect" of white voters reluctant to actually pull the lever for an African-American candidate. But what seems just as plausible as any other explanation is also the most ironic: that New Hampshire Democrats -- and especially Democratic women -- were sick of the corrosive hostility and naked slant of the mainstream media against her.Hmmm... I'm not sure how you "badly interpret" a double-digit lead in the polls. Yes, the pollsters may have screwed up, but I am not going to fault the media when all of us - ALL of us - including Hillary's own team, were convinced that she was going to lose because the polls said she was going to lose by a huge margin.
The polls that had showed Barack Obama well ahead of Clinton were not so much wrong as misleading -- or at least badly interpreted by journalists too eager to write Clinton's political obituary. In fact, the polls correctly measured Obama's share of the vote. What happened during the contest's last few days was that the undecided broke for Clinton, and the question is why.
Without depriving her and her campaign team of any credit they deserve for her late revival, it seems quite possible that all the cheap shots and hate bombs finally backfired on Clinton's aggressive adversaries in the media.
