In Calling The Race, The Media Miss by a Mile

"Huckabee took the John McCain charm-offensive page right out of the playbook," says Matthew Felling, a media analyst and former CBS blogger. "There was a cutesy factor that Huckabee had to overcome, but that got him media coverage that introduced him to a lot of people."

Huckabee drew some favorable notice for funny one-liners in the early debates, but that was about it. "My mother said he looked like such a down-home nice guy, but in the media in New York and Washington, we don't give brownie points for that," Goff says. "We look at your organization and who you've hired as a strategist."

With limited resources, media outlets focused most of their attention in the GOP race on Romney, McCain, Rudy Giuliani and, during an incredible buildup, noncandidate Fred Thompson. Like veteran Democrats Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who both dropped out Thursday, Huckabee got short shrift because he showed no signs of breaking out, which in turn relegated him to the periphery.

Romney, meanwhile, was drawing admiring coverage for his fundraising prowess, just as Howard Dean, once viewed as unstoppable, had in 2004. By this standard, Huckabee was a sidebar.

Geraghty recalls thinking that "this is a guy who everyone likes, but he isn't going to take off. When you're at 2 percent and your fundraising is going nowhere, news organizations aren't going to spend any more time on you than they have to."

But many voters, unlike journalists, didn't tune in to the campaign until the final weeks. They didn't know, or care, that Huckabee had been written off as an also-ran.

Huckabee began surging in the Iowa polls in November, and by December he was on the covers of Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine. News outlets suddenly started digging up plenty of controversies about his record in Arkansas and pounced on a series of gaffes. But it mattered little, as the former Baptist minister was buoyed by support from evangelical Christians.

Holmes blames the early dismissal of Huckabee on "the media's alienation from religious conservatives. They see those voters as exotic and foreign and don't understand them. . . . This was a case of the Washington press corps being know-it-alls."

Now that the conventional wisdom has shifted -- that is, now that some voters have actually voted -- could the media pendulum be swinging too far in the other direction?