No matter who wins the election tomorrow I know who has lost.

The media has lost.

And I know why.

TV coverage of this race has upset a lot of people, on both sides of the aisle, and for good reason. It all happens in TV studios.

Pollsters come into TV studios and anchors breathlessly quiz them on "the horse race." Or advocates come into TV studios and anchors watch the cock fight.

But that's not where news is supposed to happen.

News is supposed to happen in the field. You're supposed to have to dig for it, by talking to people, and then work hard to make the story come alive.

But all this changed with the O.J. Simpson case.

O.J. gave TV news big ratings it didn't have to work for. They could set up at the courthouse and the story came to them. Or they could bring advocates into the comfort of the studio and let them fight it out.

Big ratings with no work meant big profits. The O.J. Simpson case worked like crack cocaine on media management. All other news was ignored in favor of O.J. Nothing else happened for months except O.J.

Ever since O.J., cable news has been looking for other stories it could treat the same way. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was great for that very reason, and with MonicaGate OJ-ization moved into politics.

When something makes money, business ethics demands you do more of it. And now everything has to be put into the studio, regardless of whether it belongs there.

Politics does not belong there.

You cover politics by talking to people, a lot of people. You talk to local campaign staffs, you talk to a lot of ordinary voters. You check campaign offices regularly to see how busy they are. You gauge not just numbers but intensity. You track issues, and candidates' stands on them. You talk to voters about their feelings, and get a "feel" for what's going on.

But that's not how TV covers politics today. In the Age of O.J.-ization a story that doesn't come into the studio doesn't exist. Polls exist because that story can be told from a studio. Argument exists because advocates are happy to come to the studio.

But the real nitty-gritty of politics, the issues and the people and the hard, hard work of identifying folks and getting them to the polls, that can't exist. Because it's not profitable. It doesn't come into the studio.

Sometime after November, someone in TV media is going to figure out that if they actually go into the field and work stories they will be rewarded. Until then, the system I work in is horribly, horribly broken.

Fox didn't kill TV news. O.J. did. Easy profits killed TV news. And until viewers demand change, until they turn their TVs off if they're not getting news based on hard work, it won't get better.