Behold How Badly Our Political Journalists Have Lost the Freakin’ Plot

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/10-4


Chris Cillizza, one of the Washington Post’s franchise players on the national politics beat, epitomizes the 'insider' approach to reporting in Washington, DC.

***SNIP

Nobody knows exactly when it happened. But at some point between Teddy White’s The Making of the President, 1960 and the Willie Horton ads in 1988, political journalism in this country lost the plot. When it got overly interested in the inside game, it turned you and me and everyone who has to go into the voting booth and make a decision into an object of technique, which it then tried to assess. We became the people on whom the masters of politics practiced their craft. Then political journalism tried to recover an audience from the people it had turned into poll numbers and respondents to packaged stimuli. Tricky maneuver.

This is what led to the cult of the savvy, my term for the ideology and political style that journalists like Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin spread through their work. The savvy severs any lingering solidarity between journalists as the providers of information, and voters as decision-makers in need of it. The savvy sets up — so it can speak to and cultivate — a third group between these two: close followers of the game. The most common term for them is “political junkies.” The site that Cillizza runs was created by that term. It’s called The Fix because that’s what political junkies need: their fix of inside-the-game news.

Junkies are not normal, but they accept their deformed status because it comes with compensations. They get to feel superior to ordinary voters, who are the objects of technique and of the savvy analyst’s smart read on what is likely to work in the next election. For while the junkies can hope to understand the game and how it operates, the voters are merely operated on. Not only does the savvy sever any solidarity between political journalists and the public they were once supposed to inform, it also draws a portion of the attentive public into emotional alliance with the ad makers, poll takers, claim fakers and buck rakers within the political class— the people who, as Max Weber put it in his famous essay “Politics as a Vocation,” live off politics.

But we’re not done. The savvy sets up a fifth group. (The first four: savvy journalists, political junkies, masters of the game, and an abstraction, The Voters.) These are the people who, as Weber put it, live for politics. They are involved as determined participants, not just occasional voters. Whereas the junkies can hope for admission to the secrets of the game (by taking cues from Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin and the guys at Politico) the activists are hopelessly deluded, always placing their own ideology before the cold hard facts.

[Beearewhyain]

1. It's the TMZing of political reporting

The high school lunchroom of journalism. Who sat with who? OMG politician A snubbed politician B! This politician is "likable" while this other one is "less likable". And somehow these are to be considered grand insights into the political process.

In the meantime major policy discussion is completely absent save the occasional acknowledgment that there is in fact a policy "debate" going on. Unfortunately it's about the winning personality as opposed to a winning policy that drive most of these journalist's narratives and it is much easier to do. Policy is hard.

[Blue_Tires]

2. exactly n/t

[reusrename]

3. It's all about how to use earth tones in their wardrobe.

Justice is the littlest concern.