The Uttar Pradesh election results have caused many media folks to eat some humble pie. Most predictions about the UP elections have gone completely wrong. With the BJP winning an unprecedented number of seats, the punditry of many self-proclaimed experts now looks like trash.
One can argue that even the BJP supporters didn’t expect such a victory, but most of the supporters have a day job and they are not out in field to read the ‘pulse’ of the people. The puzzling thing is the so-called experts, the media persons, the journalists who were on the field, in the midst of the action, failed to get it right. Worse, they got it wrong by far too much.
By any count, this was a huge wave for BJP and PM Modi, but some journalists just didn’t see the ginormous wave that was right in front of them.
Here are some blasts from the past:
Forget a pan-UP wave, could our esteemed journalists at least get a single Lok Sabha seat of Varanasi right? PM Modi’s own seat of Varanasi was talked about by many in the media:
In the end, BJP won all seats in Varanasi, and its alliance won almost 4/5th seats in Uttar Pradesh.
This is not the first time the experts and journalists have got it so wrong. In fact, it was repeat of 2014 general election predictions. Even then, we had published an article that captured how wrong the media and commentators were back then. And it has happened again.
Once is a mistake, twice is choice?
