For my money, this is one of the best things Duncan's ever written, and one of the most searingly accurate brandings of our press culture I've ever read:
Watching the bobblehead coverage of the Alito hearings - and, frankly, just about everything else they cover - one comes away think that to them it just doesn't really matter. Court decisions don't matter. Policy doesn't matter. None of this stuff matters. It's just a game played between rival high school football teams and they're just happy to go to the homecoming dance.
To the media, policy is politics, politics is partisanship, and partisanship is competition. That's why we get bizarre columns like Robert Samuelson's Sebastian Mallaby's from yesterday, which took the intellectual bankruptcy of Bushonomics as a given and so decided to focus instead on Democratic quirks. In a government where Republicans control every lever of power, zooming in on the Democratic vision is about as useful as criticizing my breakfast choices, but in a punditocracy that evaluates the competition between two players rather than the structural and contextual forces that actually shape our government and its actions, giving powerless Democrats equal, or even greater, scrutiny than dominant Republicans makes perfect sense. After all, no one stops covering the Sox-Yankees rivalry just because the Yanks tend to win.
When competition is the story, likely outcomes and actual abilities are often harmful. The media profits by pretending to cover a contest of equals, to admit that reality furnishes nothing of the sort is to sucker punch their own storyline. Much better to cover two vying sports teams and pretend that, at any moment, one is as likely to win as the other. So long as they're going to cover competition, they have to pretend to believe in the competitors. In that context, policy, law, outcomes, and powers are not merely meaningless, they're that worst of all narrative irritants: distracting.
