Stories are about their characters. In a Horserace story by the news media, the characters in the story are competitors and the primary dramatic question about the characters is "Who wins and who loses?"
These stories about winning and losing include: sports stories, finance stories, most campaign-related or legislation-related stories and stories about legal disputes.
The nature of the competition in a Horserace - what's at issue between or among the characters in the story - is covered, but is not really important to the story. The competition could be over anything - a sporting event, a legal case, a political campaign - but what is really being covered is the back and forth of the competition.
When the stakes or the nature of the competition are discussed, the issues are placed in the mouths of the competitors. And, in the pursuit of being "balanced," all sides are usually given equal time to express themselves about the competition.
Since a Horserace story is boiled down to issues of competition, most of the values and judgments about it are leached out of the story. The only values implied in a story using a Horserace frame are:
- Winning is better than losing.
- Winning is true/correct.
- The competition should be fair.
With only these values to guide them, there is nothing to direct the audience which side to pick in the competition, aside from the statements of the competitors. And this creates one of the primary problems with a Horserace story. If you aren't already interested in the competition - in other words, if you aren't already a fan of one of the competitors - there isn't much of in the story to catch your interest or draw you in.
Like a sports story, an outside event, like a championship game, can help draw in a larger audience. But without such an outside event, the audience for a Horserace story is, for the most part, made up of the fans of the competitors. This is as true for political stories, whose fans are partisans and political junkies, as it is for sports.
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