But we’re not ready to throw in the towel. Even if you subscribe to the notion that ratings and readers should be the sole motivator for news outlets — an ethos that has given us ceaseless Scott Peterson coverage and pious debates about Janet Jackson’s right breast — you’ve got to admit that all this horserace stuff just isn’t all that interesting. The polls never really told us anything, and there’s no way to figure out if those much-discussed bounces ever even existed. And at times the horserace coverage seemed like a ploy, a cynical effort to give a veneer of respectability to topics viewers might otherwise deem salacious, like Mary Cheney’s sexuality.


The sad truth is that the daily horserace mania that afflicts the political press — the poll obsession, the theories about bounces, the inside baseball — reduces campaign coverage to just one more form of entertainment. The fourth estate still too often seems content to couch the election of the leader of the free world in the language of SportsCenter.

  • 1
  • 2