Suddenly, Hillary Clinton is all the rage in the US media. Newspapers appear to have switched their enthusiasm from Barack Obama to Clinton. It's happened "in the blink of an eye", writes seasoned political commentator Thomas Edsall in Huffington Post article.
He argues that the media are now "pressing just the message" that Obama would be a likely loser against the Republican candidate, John McCain, which is just the message that Clinton has been promoting for the past six weeks.
He points to switches of direction at Time, The New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
"For Hillary, the shift is a potential lifesaver," he writes. "Until now, she, her husband, and her campaign aides have been trying, with little success, to make the case that Obama has potentially fatal flaws. For the first time, reporters working for magazines, newspapers and web sites have abruptly decided that she might well be right, and the results for Obama have been brutal."
The New Republic ran a piece by John Judis suggesting that Obama resembles George McGovern, who lost the presidential race in a landslide to Richard Nixon in 1972. Then Joe Klein, in Time magazine, wrote of Obama having left the Pennsylvania primary a "stale, battered and embittered" man who was "no longer the darling of his party".
Mike Allen, writing for Politico, described the changed approach to Obama as a "paradigm shift." He cited a blog posting by the Washington Post's Joe Cillizza that was headlined "How Clinton can win it."
Then there was the New York Times's Adam Nagourney asking why Obama had been unable to win over enough working-class and white voters to wrap up the Democratic nomination. His next question: "Is the Democratic party hesitating about race as it moves to the brink of nominating an African-American to be president?"
The Washington Post's media commentator, Howard Kurtz, while arguing that both Clinton and Obama came away from Pennslyvania with egg on their faces, A plague on both houses, also raises the race factor.
These comments would doubtless surprise Anatole Kaletsky, who wrote in The Times yesterday that "political correctness... makes it almost impossible for American politicians or commentators" to as whether Obama "may by unable to carry large industrial states with socially conservative white working-class populations simply because of his race."
In fact, they are asking it now. The race has entered a crucial stage - and the media are playing a crucial role. I'm often asked what I mean by the creation of a media narrative, and the part played in that by spin-doctors.
The latest turn of events in the States shows exactly what I mean. A "line" pursued by the Clinton camp has gradually imposed itself on the supposedly "free" media and gained a hold that may well lead to Obama's defeat. And I would bet that every journalist will later claim they came to the conclusion entirely by themselves.
