And the winner is...in the interest of time, are the media tripping at the polls?

The American Journalism Review has made a point to note the ill-fated love affair the press has with the polls. When it comes the presidential race, this has not always ended well, even recently, as a recent article notes:

The media's addiction to polls and to predicting the future is obviously not new. Critics have railed against it for years. The compulsion to be ahead of the game even caused the television networks to make the wrong call on the 2000 presidential election.

Consider the race so far. From Hillary's loss in Iowa that had pegged her as dead in the water to the largely-questioned future of McCain after his budget and staff cuts, the media's need to forecast and predict a process that changes so much from day to day and primary to primary seems to just fog over a race that could be much more clearly defined by just reporting the results as they come in, the facts in present tense. So why jump the gun and report figures and opinions that can be so off base and clearly not indicative of the final outcome? It's simple--to feed the media beast.

In the fast-paced world of cable news and the Internet, the pressures are enormous to solve the riddle, right now. Cable has all that time to fill. The Web is the world of instant gratification. Who wants to hear about uncertainties and nuances and shades of gray? And, as the recent unpleasantness reminds us, newspapers — our best newspapers — are hardly immune to the fever.

So where does any sort of ethical dilemma come in to play? I think it would be fair to ask whether or not these journalists are fully serving the public. Are these horserace statistics fair and balanced coverage, or are they merely "crystal ball journalism" at a time when readers would be better served to just get the facts, not a preconceived premonition of what they may be?