We have to say it because no one else will: Almost alone among mainstream media, the National Business Review’s call on the election result turned out to be the best one.

Our summary: “National will easily win a mandate while the Greens become a stronger force on the left. Maori will not hold a balance of power and Winston Peters will be history.”

The only thing missing was the surprise decision by Helen Clark and Michael Cullen to quit the leadership of Labour on election night.

Our call was not that difficult, given the mood for change we had detected for some time. The nature of the economy has moved on a long way from Labour’s heartland base of the working class.

It was only by inflating the public sector that Labour could capture more support – but it came at the expense of the vast numbers of small business owners and the self-employed.

The media generally failed to pick up this change of mood, except when it was reflected in the polls. Hence the weasly editorials that said “the polls indicate” a change of government rather than the need for it.

The post-election Media Watch panel on election campaign coverage overlooked our positive call while criticising the focus on trivia in most coverage.

This probably made no difference to the result, other than to disguise what was really happening. The main story that probably did affect the result was the prediction that Winston Peters would not win in Tauranga.

In the event, his support base wasted their votes and gave National a clean result that could not be muddied by Maori “kingmaker” politicking, which was the most popular media call.

The left’s wholesale defeat was not reflected in the spread of commentators and pundits employed across the board. The public broadcasters – both radio and TV –can always be relied on to give Labour any doubt.

But it’s more surprising when private equity-owned MediaWorks chooses to lean even heavier to the left, mainly by hiring National Radio and TV One heavies.

Perhaps the reason Radio Live and TV3’s Sunrise have failed to gain much traction is that their personality mixes have too many of the media’s trendy lefties and not enough of those who reflect the country’s anti-socialist mood. (You can see why Newstalk is cleaning up with its strong conservative/populist line up.)

National truly reflects the heartland, yet the media are continuing down their path of denial by giving more coverage, in newspapers and on radio, to the Labour leadership issue rather than accept the broad mandate for a new broom government is much more newsworthy.