The best of the best from the world's news media were there, with resources to match, while deskbound pundits looked on in their thousands. They had years of preparation, they had polls, they had databases, they had vast experience to call on, and the electorate they needed to understand was tiny. And yet, in New Hampshire, they got it spectacularly wrong.
The time difference made it especially unpleasant for papers in Britain, with their speculative headlines about Hillary Clinton's crisis and Barack Obama's momentum lingering on the newsstands for the whole of the next day, but the humiliation was a general one.
Unthinking journalists just shrugged and moved rapidly on to Nevada and South Carolina. There is no problem, they say. Hillary's misty-eyed moment, when she almost cried on TV in the final phase of the campaign, simply threw in a wild card that no one could have predicted and tipped the balance at the last moment.
Smarter journalists, such as Justin Webb of the BBC and Rupert Cornwell of the Independent, know that is not good enough; a miscalculation so gross cannot be swept under the carpet.
I wonder how many sports editors went into their papers' morning news conferences the day after the New Hampshire primary in a state of quiet irritation.
Every day on the sports desk, they look ahead to decisive events, in football, tennis, golf, and the rest, but even with matches that seem utterly one-sided they would not be so reckless as to "call" a result in advance. Nor would they dream of devoting whole pages to analysing an outcome which hadn't yet happened.
But that is what their colleagues on the foreign news desks did in this case, and the result was to make everyone look dumb. The obituary was in print on the front page, but its subject was still out there, alive and kicking, for the world to see.
Tom Brokaw, the veteran US news presenter, was among those shocked by the misreading of New Hampshire, and on the night he came up with a suggestion. "You know what I think we're going to have to do?" he said on MSNBC. "Wait for the voters to make their judgement . . . We don't have to get in the business of making judgements before the polls have closed, and trying to stampede, in effect, the process."
For me, the story recalled Timothy Crouse's book, The Boys on the Bus, about the 1972 presidential campaign in which Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern. Crouse wrote about the press corps (a novel thing to do at the time) and they were, as you would expect, the finest reporters of their generation - but he spotted that life on the campaign trail reduced them to far less than the sum of their talents.
"They all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village," he said. "After a while, they began to believe the same rumours, subscribe to the same theories and write the same stories."
Today we might call it "groupthink", and its eternal companion is "group cock-up". I wasn't in New Hampshire and I can't be sure that pack journalism of the kind Crouse described was responsible for what happened, but a group cock-up there certainly was.
And it won't do to blame the voters and complain that they are impossibly volatile these days. We all know they are (just remember the sudden turnaround in the polls in this country last autumn) and the reporters and the pundits who want to second-guess them are fools to forget it.
Nor is it enough to say that this is just a passing tableau in the giddy pageant that is the daily press - tomorrow's fish-and-chip wrapper and no more. Brokaw's phrase about trying to "stampede the process" tells us why.
Like it or not, the news media are part of this election and not mere observers. The whole presidential campaign, on which so much depends, is as much a dialogue between candidates and reporters as it is a conversation between candidates and voters, and for reporters the responsibilities that go with that are heavy ones. Groupthink, pack journalism and stampeding won't do.
PC gone mad
Truly, we are reaching the point where it is not possible for the Conservative press to say even the plainest of things without being assailed by the bullying vigilantes of political correctness.
The Sunday Telegraph recently delivered one of its lofty defences of British tolerance and fairness, proudly declaring that for at least 150 years it has not been necessary to be a Christian "to enjoy the full liberties of the British subject".
A reader from Devon wrote in to the paper to point out that while it may not have been necessary to be a Christian, it was necessary to be a man.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
