CJR Daily’s Liz Cox Barrett writes about the media (MSNBC) and the Hillary Clinton surprise victory…

As my colleague Gal Beckerman observed earlier today, with last night’s New Hampshire victory, Hillary beat the press.

Meanwhile, the press spent some time last night beating itself.

Here is a sampling of the sort of mild self-flagellation on display last night on MBSNC (the channel I happened to be watching) where many of the network’s familiar faces-with the exception of Chris Matthews-seemed to be doing some form of soul-searching for having, as Tom Brokaw put it, prematurely and sometimes excitedly “end[ed] the Clinton era,” for having been so sure of New Hampshire’s outcome hours or even days before the polls closed. (Sounds familiar, no?) Often, it seemed to be Brokaw gently apologizing for his onetime peers. (Maybe that’s what gravitas means).

I’m going to step in here and weigh in a bit in defense of the media, and not just MSNBC, regarding what happened Tuesday. It’s easy to say “the Media got it wrong”. But “the Media” was basing its results on polling data that was nearly universally showing Obama with a major cushion going in to Tuesday’s vote.

If you want to argue that the media should be more restrained in making judgements like that, that is a fair and reasonable argument to make. But in arguing that you need to address the fundamental issue that we as viewers have grown accustomed to and nearly insist upon instant gratification. If we don’t see it in the newspaper, we’ll check the TV. If we don’t see it on TV, we’ll check the internet. As viewers we are a contributing factor in the rush to judgement.

If you want to point a finger at the media, you should put it on its over-reliance on polling data, whether it’s pre-election polling or exit polling, in basing its judgements. The polling was right going in to the election but not capable of measuring the last second swing that was coming. But the media had no way of knowing that at the time because it wasn’t reflected in the polls.

9 times out of 10 polling ends up being right and you don’t hear anyone complain about the Media. It’s only when that 1 out of 10 incident occurs that everybody gets upset. The current system works. Most of the time…

Update: The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz writes about all the hand wringing…

“Look at this cycle,” says CBS correspondent Jeff Greenfield. “McCain front-runner, McCain dead, McCain is back. Hillary inevitable, Hillary toast, Hillary is back. There is no defense for this. It is built into our DNA.”

Greenfield fell into the trap with a Slate piece Tuesday on how Clinton and other candidates could recover from early losses, leading to a hastily added postscript: ” OK, Hillary won tonight. Oh, waiter, two orders of crow, please. This is what happens when you ignore your own advice to let the people vote first.”

Once it was enough to cover and analyze a campaign. Now, in an age of endless blogging and blabbing, journalists rush to declare winners and losers in advance. They rely on a plethora of polls that sometimes miss late shifts in sentiment, driven by events such as the endless replays of Clinton choking up in a coffee shop Monday. Gina Glantz, Bill Bradley’s 2000 campaign manager, says female voters resented the way mostly male pundits handled the incident.

“Women watched the media treat her in almost demeaning ways — not for what kind of president she would be, but whether she looked angry or practiced tearing up,” Glantz says. “It was really quite obnoxious.”