Prior to counting the votes in North Carolina and Indiana, the traditional media had its post-election narrative all prepared: Obama had once again done poorly among white working class voters, Clinton had out-maneuvered him on the summer gas tax waiver, Reverend Wright was damaging Obama’s candidacy, rural voters had rebelled against Obama’s calling them “bitter,” and Clinton had the momentum while Obama clung to the ropes waiting for the last primary bell to ring. This narrative so dominated the two weeks since Pennsylvania that even Obama supporters who understood the mathematical impossibility of a Clinton victory worried that the nomination would somehow become hers. But as has so often proved true this campaign season, the traditional media created its narrative despite polls showing that Obama was maintaining support, and that his base remained galvanized. Last night not only was a climatic victory for Barack Obama, but a stunning rebuff of the conventional “wisdom” that still dominates the traditional media.

For the first time since this long campaign began in early 2007, I stopped carefully reading various newspapers coverage of the presidential primaries in the week before the election. The prevailing narrative was so at odds with information freely available at Daily Kos and other sites---much of which we put out on Beyond Chron---that I really felt like the world described in the New York Times, Washington Post and other papers was a completely separate reality.

The daily newspapers’ dominant view---that Obama was reeling while Clinton had successfully reinvented herself as a populist, working-class hero---seemed lacking in factual basis, but it was repeated day after day by multiple reporters.

Even Obama supporter and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert expounded the prevailing view that the Illinois Senator was appearing “weak,” was not a “fighter,” and lacked the vision that Clinton was allegedly offering voters.

If there was a single national reporter or pundit who predicted that Clinton’s gas tax scam would hurt rather than help her, send me their name. Everyone I heard was convinced that, as bad a policy as it was, nobody ever lost votes offering a tax cut.

It seems the middle and working-class is not as easily fooled as the media assumed. Although the media completely ignored Clinton blaming Bush for the closing of an Indiana factory actually shut down by her husband, the voters knew and were not fooled.

In Eastern North Carolina, in a town called Clinton, rural voters unexpectedly rejected their namesake for Barack Obama. Rural voters have backed Obama from Iowa to Kansas, from Idaho to North Dakota---and were not fooled yesterday by Clinton and the media telling them to resent Obama’s “elitism.”

Remember the stories that said that Obama’s denouncement of Wright could divide his African-American voting base? Well, Obama did better among African-Americans yesterday than Kerry did against George W. Bush in 2004.

Obama not only funded his candidacy through the Internet, but the conveying of accurate information via the Internet allowed him to overcome---and to a great extent, ignore---the demands of the traditional media and its punditry.

Obama’s victory has weakened and discredited the longstanding power of the corporate media over the presidential election process. Yet another historic accomplishment from this remarkable man.