Jay Newton-Small has a piece in the Washington Post arguing that the AP’s attempts to bring more “attitude” to its political coverage are strangely out of character and that the AP is surrendering its brand, that of the down-the-middle “neutral abiter”:

“I worry that their strategy is too 2004 Web and not a 2008 approach to the Web,” says Dick Keil, a former AP reporter who spent 20 years working for wire services before becoming a political consultant. “It’s like New Coke — it seems cool now, but just wait. It could bring down the whole company: They have a recognized, respected and trusted brand and identity, and they are moving in a radically new direction likely to make the vast majority of their subscribers uncomfortable.”

…[I]n a world, and a Web, full of analysis, opinion and “accountability journalism,” what’s missing is a neutral referee. Which is a bit like living in a world with a North Pole and a South Pole but no equator. If there’s no one to set the standard, how will we know when we’ve crossed the line?

I wish Keil or Newton-Small had explained what they think a “2008 approach to the web” is, because the piece offers no ideas on that front beyond the rhetorical flourish. In any case, the problem with this piece is that it follows the classic line of reasoning of Jay Rosen’s bete noir, the newsroom curmudgeon: the past was great, the present scary, and the future, potentially apocalyptic.

Of those three notions, the first is by far the most pernicious. The past just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The piece ignores the crisis in credibility that has afflicted the media over the past generation. The idea of a media “neutral arbiter” – Walter Cronkite, the New York Times, the AP – is a fiction, harking back to a fleeting era of political consensus dating to the “Mad Men” era. This Olympian media ideal has been eroding ever since, and the erosion accelerated during the Bush years. It has hit two low points recently – the media’s credulous treatment of the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war with Iraq; and in the cable talking heads-driven, “everybody is equally at fault” approach to campaign coverage. (Though there’s finally been some pushback on the latter in response to the McCain campaign’s aggressive pushing of falsehoods.)

The AP’s attempts to bring more attitude to its political coverage, directed by Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, have been erratic. Sometimes laziness or outright bias has taken the place of substantive argument, and Newton-Small’s piece makes it clear that some AP reporters are uncomfortable with the new approach. But at least they’re trying. The traditional “AP brand” is already dead, and just wishing we could somehow reanimate it won’t address the problems that killed it.