Looking over the media’s political coverage of the past week, a casual observer might think s/he was back in the 1990s. There’s a big scandal involving the Democratic governor of Illinois trying to sell the president-elect’s senate seat. Will it hurt the party? The incoming administration? Caroline Kennedy wants to be the next junior senator from New York. Are the Democrats embracing dynastic politics? The president-elect gives a press conference announcing the new secretary of education – in which he dodges questions and bores reporters present – just like his obfuscating predecessors!
I sympathize with the media. The fact is, there isn’t much political news right now, though there’s a great hunger for it. Obama is not yet president. He’s making appointments, but those people aren’t actually doing anything yet. Bush is making dog videos. And Congress has adjourned after deadlocking on the auto bailout.
But what we see here is more than just an attempt to fill space. The media is falling back into old habits perfected during the vaporous Clinton scandals of the 1990s. The not-so-subliminal message in this coverage: You thought things would be different with Obama. But they’re not. Politics as usual. Scandals. Spin. Coverups! And, if we’re lucky, a feeding frenzy!
Drill down a little, and most of these questions turn out to be off-base. Take Dana Milbank’s piece on Obama’s press conference. Is it reasonable to expect a press conference announcing the new education secretary to be anything but deadly dull? Is it reasonable to expect Obama to step into the state-level political tempest over how to choose his replacement in the Senate? Or to opine on an investigation in which he is at best very tangentially involved? When Clinton or Bush “dodged questions” about investigations, they (or their subordinates) were the ones being investigated.
Enormous changes are brewing in the country and in government itself. Big Government is back – and it may be the only thing that can save us. This has tremendous implications for American politics. The political media, however, doesn’t seem to get this. It’s bad at covering the actual workings of government, the nexus of politics and policy. In a pinch, it always returns to a set of commonly-held tropes and cliches forged during the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. Proven cable chat-generators, these focus heavily on the habitual hypocrisy of politicians, the always-disjointed relationship between their words and actions – but not on the substance of the actions themselves.
This is both predictable and comforting – all the more reason we’re seeing it now, when no one knows what the hell is going to happen. But not promising.
December 17, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Spot on, sir! Love this.
December 17, 2008 at 4:43 pm
It is red-meat time again. Just today I was ranting to my husband (a retired newsman) about the very same thing. Only you expressed it far more eloquently than I did.
When are the pundits going to get real? A major bi-partisan Senate report released last week tying Bush Administration to torture gets little, if any, media attention.
December 17, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Superb! Glad it’s on the HuffPo. We need a small organization of committed journalists (there must be lots of them available!) to begin, collectively, the work that is not being done. Would an ‘un-flashy’ collective work? I guess Josh Marshall is the best existing example.
The apparent need to react to immediate ‘news’ outweighs anything substantive. Maybe Bill Moyers would be willing to lend his name–
there’s got to be a way…..
December 17, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I’ve come to the conclusion that some who call themselves journalists these days don’t even know the first thing about Journalism 101.
These are media types who themselves, don’t even understand the issues, so how can they even report on it?
So, instead of trying to find ways to understand this massive problem that we face as a nation, they engage in stupidity.
Many of us out of the Beltway could not care not one bit about this breathless hyperventilating we see everyday, even as the President-Elect tries to do his job.
Where are the true journalists? Would they stand up and try to reclaim their profession?
I wonder which one will stand and tell their pseudo peers that enough is enough. Give some Republicans like Gingrich and McCain credit for standing up to their party, telling them to cut off the crap.
Who amongs the journalists will do the same, not just because of this latest coverage, but just for the sake of doing it right.
As gatekeepers, who will tell this bloviating media that we don’t care about what they say and write anymore?
As for Dana Milbank, as far as I am concerned, he is an irrelevant pompus ivy league educated guy whose ego is too large that it blinds him. He’s trying hard to wrestle the funny from Maureen Dowd. But he has failed miserably.
Talk about hiding behind Fitzgerald, Milbank hid behind the skirts of his ombdusman when he lied in one of his column about a conversation between Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, during Obama’s overseas trip.
My guess is that Milbank, who is part of this herd of cattle, was only writing what he had heard someone else erroneously state.
We are in dire need to “real journalists.”
This is a most serious plea.