If you haven’t read Jay Rosen on media and politics, this speech is a great introduction to three of the most bankrupt characteristics of of modern political journalism:
1. Politics as an inside game.
2. The cult of savviness.
3. The production of innocence.
I thought the last sentence of this quote from another Rosen interview was spot-on:
Horse race journalism is a reusable model for how to do campaign coverage in which you focus on who’s going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister.
And it’s easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either.