Expanding on one point in my Prospect piece:
The faux-objective style of the traditional newspaper is increasingly useless in a political landscape in which spin has leeched from campaigns into every aspect of politics and policy. The result: the prestige beats in Washington — campaigns and the White House — are increasingly detached from reality. The coverage tends to be impressionistic and insidery, a weird mash-up of Maureen Dowd, Karl Rove, Drudge, and cable news. And it has almost nothing to do with the day-to-day concerns of most people or the functioning of government itself.
It’s obvious to anyone watching cable that campaign coverage is its own universe, operating by its own internal rules, obsessed most of the time with hour-by-hour tactical advantage and hot-button cultural trivia. Not even hot button issues that matter, like abortion or affirmative action or the place of religion in the public square, but questions like Obama’s lipstick-on-a-pig comment. But has this same trend also shaped coverage of the White House and other more substantive government beats? I’d say yes.
With the Clinton psychodramas, one man’s personal failings became the stuff of right-wing obsession, and an impeachment effort that ignored the more judicious views of the public. The Drudge era began, and the media realized there was a reliable source of ratings gold in the mashup of the trivial and the presidential.
Later, with the runup the Iraq war, most of the media fell in line behind a series of spurious ideas: that Saddam Hussein was a strategic threat to the United States, that he had WMDs and was ready to use them, and that Rumsfeld, who deplored nation-building, could successfully manage the invasion’s aftermath. Meanwhile, as the Bush administration actively sought to delegitimize the “media filter” and pursued various radical projects – torture, the unitary executive, the surveillance state – the media reacted with caution and uncertainty. (There are, of course, exceptions to this – McClatchy, or the Gellman/Becker Cheney series, now a book.)
In a nutshell, both political institutions and media institutions behaved very badly, and neither has really recognized the problem, let alone done much work to acknowledge and recover from the inevitable loss of credibility. Most of the traditional media – the big papers, the networks – still go about their business as if they were still institutions commanding unparalleled respect and credibility, in part because they believe they are covering institutions that also have unparalleled respect and credibility. Today, after Iraq, Katrina, and the banking debacle, they don’t. You can sense this dissonance in many newspaper stories on the White House, which are infused with a kind of awe and written in the staid language of a bygone era.
