With a pivotal presidential election just around the corner, attendance was robust at the panel dubbed "Media and the Elections: Covering 2008" at the National Conference for Media Reform. The discussion didn't produce any silver-bullet solutions for immediate improvement of political coverage, but the panelists offered substantial food for thought as Barack Obama and John McCain head for a November showdown.

The starting point, naturally, was the dismal state of mainstream media election coverage: the off-the-charts obsession with remarks made by Obama's pastor, the Rev. James Wright; the racism and sexism on display in coverage of the Obama and Clinton campaigns; the gaping media blind spots on issues of race, the environment, and unemployment; and the marginalization of third-party and lesser-known candidates. John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the book Tragedy and Farce, put the problem in stark terms: "We're not just seeing bad media. We're seeing assault and battery on our democracy."

Robert "Biko" Baker, a community activist with the League of Young Voters in Milwaukee, brought a more street-level perspective to the topic, describing the poverty and disenfranchisement of the youth he works with—and the vast distance between them and the talking heads on CNN and Fox. "Corporate America runs the media and will continue to run the media until we stop it," he said before concluding with a clarion call: "The world is in peril. We have to challenge our contradictions."

Sirota, author of The Uprising, added a fresh twist to the discussion. Many of us, he noted, see the media as a monolithic force, and we await the news sent down from "Media Mount Olympus." But that passive role is exactly what has strengthened the role of the "paternalistic" media. "We have the chance to be our own media," he says, and we ought to seize it. For another audience, this might have sounded like a simplistic bromide. But for this crowd, made up largely of indie media activists and advocates, it sounded plausible, and when they filed out of the room, you suspected they might just go out and do it.

For more on the National Conference for Media Reform, click here.

After slobbering over a never-to-materialize Barack Obama win in New Hampshire and flip-flopping on the electoral viability of a crotchety John McCain, the media has proved that their skill at horse-race forecasting is about as reliable as that of people who bet on real-life horse races. That is to say, they’re not good at it.

Jay Rosen, a veteran media critic, has written a great takedown of horse-race journalism for TomDispatch and Salon. Rosen gets to the depth of the problem: It’s easy for over-taxed journalists to write horse-race style pieces, especially if everybody else is doing it.

Who’s-gonna-win is portable, reusable from cycle to cycle, and easily learned by newcomers to the press pack. Journalists believe it brings readers to the page and eyeballs to the screen. It “works” regardless of who the candidates are, or where the nation is in historical time. No expertise is actually needed to operate it. In that sense, it is economical. (And when everyone gets the winner wrong the “surprise” becomes a good story for a few days.) Who’s going to win—and what’s their strategy—plays well on television, because it generates an endless series of puzzles toward which journalists can gesture as they display their savviness, which is the unofficial religion of the mainstream press.

Where the media could be chattering about why a candidate should win, instead they blabber about if the candidate will win. It’s a pernicious problem. Hopefully Rosen’s article might start a narrative of self-reflection among some journalists. I give it about a 20 percent chance of succeeding.

—Brendan Mackie