ALEX CHADWICK, host:
Back now with Day to Day. If, as the saying goes, journalism is the first draft of history, you watched it being drafted last night as the media focused on the conclusion of the primary season. NPR's David Folkenflik is with us from New York. David, what about the TV networks watching Barack Obama's moment approach?
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: It felt a little bit like the countdown to New Year's in 2000 where, you know, you knew what was going to happen, you knew roughly when it would happen, and you were sort of watching it tick downward. You saw slightly different counts on the different networks. Fox News, I believe relying on the Associated Press, called it pretty early. But if you watched MSNBC and CNN, they both had slightly different delegate countdowns. And then as somebody else would announce either on their air or throw out a statement you know, that they had switched support or were coming out for Senator Obama, suddenly you'd see the breaking news (unintelligible) appear, and they would say hey, we're getting that much closer. It was also interesting to see a little bit of difference in tones.
If you turned on CNN, you saw a lot of the minutia of the politicking and positioning. MSNBC might have emphasized slightly more of the notion of this being a historic moment. Fox News commentators were more quickly pivoting to the notion of well, in the general election, how is Senator Obama going to be able to dispel these unsavory associations, to shed this taint that may have somehow accompanied - from the controversies about his former pastor. And so it was interesting to see the slightly different aspects play out.
CHADWICK: It was really the Associated Press, you mentioned them earlier, that set the tone for the day.
FOLKENFLIK: Yeah, well, and this was a very interesting thing. It's a little glimmer of an insight into how the media works. A little before 11 o'clock, about 10:50 or so, the Associated Press put out a bulletin, and it started "Officials say Hillary Rodham Clinton will acknowledge tonight that Barack Obama has the delegates for the nomination."
And we like to say in the news business, not so much. If you watched her speech, she didn't do that at all. The AP's language sort of shifted over the course of the day. Late in the day, they reported that she'd changed her mind. That she wouldn't be doing that. And then in fact, there was almost instant pushback from some of her most senior aides, like Harold Ickes and Terry McAuliffe. The AP really is - you know - is the wire that serves almost every major media outlet in the country. It really set the tone in the scramble, making it even tougher for the Clinton camp to claim that there was any suspense in what was going to happen.
CHADWICK: What about today as you go forward?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I think it's worth taking a moment. You know, I was born in 1969. On my 18th birthday, my grandfather Jack Pearlstein (ph) gave me a gift and he told me, imagine something impossible. And I couldn't fathom what he was getting at. Well, I opened the present and it was a copy of the New York Times from the day man walked on the moon. I realized for him this was impossible. For me, it was something I took almost a little bit for granted.
If you look at a lot of headlines today, you think of the Chicago Tribune, Obama's home paper, of course. But it - the headline is "Obama Makes History." And the subhead on one of the stories was "It Would Not Have Been Possible 40 Years Ago." It is sort of a moment. Senator Clinton did not concede the nomination, it's important to acknowledge that, but nonetheless, he is over the tipping point. And I think there's probably a lot of parents and a lot of grandparents who, whatever one thinks of Senator Obama, whether he turns out to be a successful candidate - or should he win, a successful president. A lot of people may well save their newspapers this morning with that kind of historic headline my grandfather gave me those years ago.
CHADWICK: David Folkenflik covers news and the media for NPR. David, thank you.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
