In Calling Elections: The History Of Horse-Race Journalism, Thomas Littlewood (Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) provides an excellent and informative survey of how journalism came to report on the presidential selection and election process as if it were a day at the race track, complete with such metaphors as "dark horse candidate" and "neck and neck at the finish line". Calling Elections reveals how treating elections as a spectator sport was the result of an intermixture of gambling, politics, the press, sports language intermingling with political rhetoric, a government spoils system, the development of modern statistical polling, the involvement of partisan organizations, and the perverse conviction of many 20th century journalists that substantive political presentations were not interesting to the people who bought their papers, listened to their broadcast news reports, or tuned in to their television segments. Calling Elections is "must" reading for journalism students, political science students, and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the politics of news reporting and the news reporting of politics.