Here is a very interesting article on political journalism and why it sucks so badly. "Yawn," you may be thinking, "I've read that one before. Several times." You're potentially right, but give this one a go.
The point, once it gets there, is that political journalism shouldn't focus on who is going to win, but on who should win. An excerpt from the end of the article:
"[T]he job of the campaign press is not to preempt the voters' decision by asking endlessly, and predicting constantly, who's going to win. The job is to make certain that what needs to be discussed will be discussed in time to make a difference - and then report on that."
Damn skippy. The article starts out by claiming that the media is a mindless beast that does horse race political coverage because that's what everyone else does. It then starts to make the case that "expertise" in this field (namely, predicting political outcomes determined by voters) is dubious at best. This dovetails interestingly with a book I read recently called Super Crunchers that pretty much debunks all form of human "expertise" where it concerns analyzing data and making predictions based on that (and instead claims that machines can make much more accurate predictions, so we should let them do the predicting while we spend our brain cells on more creative, humany things like imagining what else we could have machines predict for us).
Combining these two perspectives, one could make the case that not only is horse race political journalism bad for democracy (in the sense that it pretends to predict outcomes but actually ends up unduly influencing them), but it's also a job much better left to number crunchers than so-called political "experts" who are terrible at it anyway. How many points was Obama supposed to win NH by, again? That would then free up real journalists to cover real issues and where candidates stand on them. Imagine that.
