The Sunday political talk shows—your "Meet the Press," your "This Week," your "Face the Nation"—embody just about everything that's wrong with American politics, with Washington, D.C, and with the media. Every Sunday, you can flip between them and watch one party hack or another mindlessly deliver talking points, then watch the host try fruitlessly to trap said hack in some piece of hypocritical position-switching, then watch a bunch of "party strategists" bicker through the delivery of more talking points. I can understand why people who aren't interested in politics would find them unbearable, but even I can't stand them, and I'm someone who listens to C-SPAN radio in the car. (If you're interested in the depths of my disgust, you can read more here).

But there's no doubt they play an important role in Washington's political life, through the twin powers of agenda-setting and status conferral. The topics discussed on the Sunday shows are considered important topics, and the people who appear are considered important people. Back when George W. Bush was president, I worked at Media Matters for America, and during that time we started counting the guests on the Sunday shows to see what kind of ideological, gender, and racial diversity there was on these most prestigious of talk shows. When we released our first report on it—showing, among other things, that Republicans dramatically outnumbered Democrats, and conservatives outnumbered liberals—the producers of the shows responded by saying, "Well, that's because the Republicans are in power, so they're the newsmakers. If Democrats take control, then we'll be interviewing them more often."

So everything changed once Obama got elected, right? Nope.

A year or two ago, people would heap scorn on the Huffington Post, since although it employs excellent journalists who do valuable reporting, it also practices a brutal click-driven kind of management, in which celebrity news and grabby headlines are used to pull readers in, leaving some vaguely ashamed they read it in spite of themselves. HuffPo may not have invented the sideboob slideshow, but they brought it to such a high level that they eventually created an entire sideboob section on their web site, which is, not surprisingly, the top result you get on Google when you search the term. The section was created as a joke, but also kind of not.

Yet these days, you don't hear many of those complaints about HuffPo anymore. Why? One word: Buzzfeed. One might not have thought that another web site could find gold in the combination of guilty pleasure clickbait and actual journalism that HuffPo pioneered, but Buzzfeed did. Today, if someone is lamenting our short attention spans and the endless search for traffic, Buzzfeed is the site they'll mention. And how did they do it? Lists. Magical, wonderful lists. And Corgis. And Ryan Gosling. And lists about corgis and Ryan Gosling. Sideboob pics are for amateurs; if you want to grab the clicks, try "The 14 Most Insane Wedding Dresses of All Time," or "37 Professional Photoshoppers Who Should Be Fired Immediately," or "26 Things You Never Want to See Under a Microscope." Just try to resist clicking, I dare you.

So is there a way for politicians to get some of this action? The National Republican Congressional Committee, a name virtually synonymous with hip young people retweeting things with extra exclamation points, is betting that there is, according to the National Journal:

When you write for a magazine with a particular ideological bent, it's natural to wonder whether you're being too soft on "your" side. This question comes up more when your side is actually in power, since they're the ones who are implementing policies and making decisions; when the other side is in charge, most of your time is spent documenting and analyzing all the harmful and dangerous things they're doing, and your side is occupied with fighting the ruling party and waiting for its turn. Obviously, politics is a never-ending conflict, and that conflict can produce a certain siege mentality. For instance, when a Democratic president proposes a plan for universal health coverage and Republicans attack it with a campaign of mind-boggling hysteria and dishonesty (death panels!), it's natural to spend a good deal of time correcting the record and defending it, even if you think that plan is less than ideal. There are some people (like Glenn Greenwald) who write largely about one set of issues, and thus may find themselves regularly criticizing a president from the party they're closer to if that party doesn't live up to the standards they hold, but if you write about a range of issues, most of the time you won't be critical of your side for the simple reason that most of the time you agree with what they're doing.

That doesn't mean that by doing so you've abandoned critical thinking. On health care, for instance, my own position was like that of many liberals who wrote a lot about the issue—that the Affordable Care Act had a number of weaknesses and could have been much better than it was, but nevertheless represented an extraordinary advance that would have a positive impact on millions of lives. Did the second part of that position make us unthinking water-carriers? I don't think so, but Matt Welch of Reason might argue that it does. In an article titled "The Death of Contrarianism," Welch laments that while liberals (and liberal magazines) used to be skeptical of liberalism, in the Obama years they've become little more than a bunch of Democratic party apparatchiks. "The reformist urge to cross-examine Democratic policy ideas," he writes, "has fizzled out precisely at the time when those ideas are both ascendant and as questionable as ever." Welch seems to pine for the time when The New Republic was torpedoing Bill Clinton's attempt at health care reform by publishing the policy con artist Betsy McCaughey and beating the drums for the invasion of Iraq, because that represented a healthy contrarianism.

You should read Ed Kilgore's response to Welch, but I'd point out that contrarianism in and of itself is nothing to be proud of.

At the New Republic, Rebecca Dana has a profile of MSNBC chief Phil Griffin, during which she points out that the network's current incarnation as the liberal's home on cable came about only because Griffin tried a bunch of other stuff that didn't work. There wasn't an ideological motivation, just a financial one. "Fox News is a TV network that succeeds because of its ideological slant," she writes. "MSNBC is a TV network that has an ideological slant because that's what happened to succeed."

Good news, ladies! Feminism has fizzled, and those of us who aren’t suckers are giving up our career dreams to follow our female nature. Our lady brains and lady bodies aren’t cut out for the workplace, you see, and our manly, oafish husbands will never be as good as we are at cleaning the toilet, so why fight it? We’ll all be more fulfilled if we quit our jobs and make like June Cleaver by way of Martha Stewart. At least this is the point of the latest "trend" piece in New York magazine by Lisa Miller.

Every year, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism releases a huge report called "The State of the News Media," and this year's installment contains some surprising results, far beyond what you'd expect about declining newspaper revenues and the generalized slow death of journalism (though there's plenty of that). In particular, television news is undergoing some rapid changes, most of which are driven by finances and many of which look seriously problematic.

Let's start with local TV news (we'll get to cable in a moment)...