I think the shaming of the punditocracy should also cause people to ask whether the best role of journalists, even “opinion journalists,” is to keep close tabs on the “horse race” aspect of politics and elections. It often seems that media outlets have abandoned the job of understanding and explaining policies and policy proposals and their effects in favor of “who’s winning now” stories. The latter are typically lower-cost, can easily be outsourced, and are often easier to sell to readers and viewers, who are naturally intrigued by narratives of competition. But their prominence also seems a result of news media searching for subject matter that is safe from complaints of “bias” (nine times out of ten, you can add “liberal” to that word). Explaining that there is a growing consensus among economists about the folly of supply-side policies, or that Romney’s “deficit-reduction plan” is incoherent, might be seen by some as an partisan intervention in the election, while simply reporting on the ins and outs of polls is often construed as “objective.” But ironically, even the latter has not proven safe from knee-jerk accusations of bias, particularly from the right–as your post discusses.

This is an old complaint, of course, but I thought it was worth adding here.