by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
In light of the latest round of bashing Russertism—loosely, the fact that the press expends a good chunk of its face time with candidates hectoring them with criticism of inconsistency, imperfection, or attempts to goad them into starting intra-party squabbles or speaking politically inconvenient truths like "we must raise taxes to close the deficit, unless we want to eliminate all student loans and disband The Marines", without giving any sense of the relative importance of various issues—and Ben Smith's summary of Obama's Meet The Press appearance: "Obama won [his appearance on Meet The Press] by not losing, and didn't commit any news", now is as good a time as any to remind everyone of Why Americans Hate The Media. As James Fallows points out, much of the media-crit story transcends time and place, which makes it very hard to come up with good ways to eliminate the disconnect between political journalism and the self-reported news interests of Real America.
—Signed, not Ezra Klein
