Every once in a while, the Politico's co-founders, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, pen a big old "think piece," in which they step back and evaluate the way things have been going in the political world lately. The latest installment, titled "How Obama Plays Media Like a Fiddle," is at once insightful and lacking in self-awareness. Here's an excerpt:
Conservatives are convinced the vast majority of reporters at mainstream news organization are liberals who hover expectantly for each new issue of The Nation.
It's just not true. The majority of political writers we know might more accurately be accused of centrist bias.
That is, they believe broadly in government activism, but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship.
Governance, in the Washington media's ideal, should be a tidier and more rational process than it is.
In this fantasy, every pressing problem could be solved with a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Sam Nunn and David Gergen that would go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base for a week, not coming back until it had a deal to cut entitlements and end obesity.
There's plenty more -- about the respect President Obama gains among the press by meeting with Republican elders like Ken Duberstein, about how he cleverly encourages the facile historical analogies of which reporters are so fond, and so on. All true. But there's something missing, too.
The story implies that all of these biases reporters have are problematic. Harris and VandeHei call those historical comparisons "often glib or even bogus." They say that "the presss bias for bipartisan process ... often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy." That naturally begs the question of whether reporters might approach things a little differently. So the question you're left asking is, is the fault, dear John and Jim, not in your colleagues but in yourselves?
Harris and VandeHei don't ask just what we lose when our press is so easily bought off by nods to bipartisanship, or distracted from the substance of policy. What have they themselves been ignoring? Could they have done a better job? And now that they have identified these problems, might they encourage some kind of change at their own publication? Because after all, almost every pathology of the American political press is magnified in the Politico itself. If you want to find shallow coverage obsessed with tactics and appearances, easily swayed by momentary shifts in polls and contemptuous of anything that steps outside the conventional wisdom of the moment, there's no better place to go. And that's not going to change.
