Covering elections like a horse race.

As if they were calling a horse race, election season pollsters and pundits provide their daily insight as to which candidate is out front, who is trailing the pack, and who is stumbling. Critics of such journalistic practice say that the coverage of issues suffers, and voters don't get what they need, as they did in the good old days. Their memories are dim, though.

Not only has horse-race journalism been around nearly 170 years, "there never was a golden era of political journalism," maintains Thomas Littlewood, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois. "The conceptions that some people have, including some academics, that there was a golden age of very lucid, penetrating, informative, issue-based journalism in the past is not true."

In the 1820s, supporters of Andrew Jackson conducted the first straw polls. They would take unscientific surveys at rallies and social events friendly to their cause, then report the favorable results to partisan newspapers to get them published. It wasn't "circulation-grubbing newspaper editors" who instigated those first straw polls, Littlewood points out, but politicians seeking a way to get Jackson, their presidential candidate, noticed by the political establishment.

Although the use of that type of poll died out, the interest in the horse race never did, says Littlewood, a former campaign reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. "Once we had a system of competitive elections, the thing about...