KNOWING STUFF VERSUS LEARNING STUFF.

This Matt Bai quote nicely illustrates one of the more frustrating tensions in political journalism.

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Obviously, that doesn't make much sense. Matt Bai's conversations with those three Iowans would have gone fairly far towards explaining what those three Iowans thought was driving their vote. But though people don't tell themselves that they're tribal creatures who rationalize their attachments and make judgments based on the state of macroeconomic indicators, that explanation fits the data a lot better than anything Bai would have heard over dinner. Indeed, imagine those were Democratic Iowans. In 2004, they would have told Bai that they really believed it important to have a former war hero leading the nation in these times of peril and crisis. In 2008, that wouldn't have been important to them at all, and instead, they'd have been more interested in a new direction and something called "change." What people tell you about their vote often tells you a lot more about what they've been told about their vote than about why they're voting the way they are.But Bai's piece does lay bare the journalistic tendency to prize "talking to people about stuff" over "learning about stuff." If I call up Peter Orszag and ask him about the budget outlook, I'm "reporting." So too if I attend a press conference and listen to other people ask Peter Orszag about the budget outlook. But if I spend a couple hours at my desk reading CBO and OMB documents, I'm not "reporting." I'm researching. And to get an idea of how the guild distinguishes between the two, note that though a lot of journalists call themselves "reporters," none call themselves "researchers."I'd just add to all this that there's an element of self-preservation to the hostility some journalists -- not necessarily Bai -- have for academics and policy wonks. We all do similar things. A reporter and an economist and a Brookings economic fellow all write articles and op-eds about the economy. The economists undoubtedly know more about the economy than the journalist. But the journalist doesn't want his paper to fire him and hire the Brookings guy instead. So emphasizing advantages becomes important. One of those advantages, of course, is the ability to write. The other is the ability to report. And, as the argument goes, the ability to report obviates the problems of ignorance because you can ask the economists to explain whatever it is you don't know. That's not been my finding as a journalist -- my reporting yields much more when I'm well-versed on a topic -- but even so, it has certainly worked to my advantage that the profession doesn't demand a graduate degree, and that's because folks like Bai have done a good job subtly degrading the value that journalism places on academic expertise.