Media reporters and experts cover, weigh and analyze each day’s events, and that’s appropriate.  But many of them use the day’s events to issue pronouncements about the future, picking winners and losers in an off-year election 11 months away or deciding who’s ahead in a presidential race three years from now.  It’s like a movie critic reviewing an entire two-hour film after looking at one frame. Some of this is intrinsic to modern journalism. News is what’s happening right now, or just happened, or is about to happen.