… The role of expectations in framing press evaluations of presidential debates is sufficiently familiar that we are now regularly subjected to meta-analyses of the “expectations game” in which members of the media evaluate how well the campaigns are manipulating the media. Less commonly discussed, however, is why this practice developed in the first place, or what keeps it intact from one election to the next. How did “expectations” become the primary metric by which candidates are judged? CONT.
David A. Hopkins, Boston College