Yes, the Republican plan would be a huge change to the current program, and seniors would have to pay more for their health plans if it becomes law. Democrats, including President Barack Obama, have said they are strongly opposed to the plan.

But to say the Republicans voted to end Medicare, as the ad does, is a major exaggeration. All seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal, and the program’s budget would increase every year.

Medicare defenders have objected on the grounds that the GOP changes to the program would render it so radically different in form from the old, and the benefits would fall so far short in various ways, that it effectively means the end of Medicare “as we know it.” PolitiFact alludes to that, saying calling it a “critical qualifier” the ad should have included.

Here’s my problem. This is a semantic thicket, and adjudicating this is a hopelessly slippery distraction. PolitiFact has fallen into a trap that exposes some of the limits of political fact-checking as currently practiced.

There is no fact-based “objective” answer to the question at hand. A binary choice will either favor the biases of Republicans, who stress continuity (disingenuously, in my view, given Medicare as currently constituted is viewed by so many people as virtually sacrosanct), or of Democrats, who stress the discontinuity (overplaying that hand in the TV spot). The Republican plan would replace the current version of Medicare with a radically different program. Is this still “Medicare”? Well, it’s still called Medicare, and still pays for (some) health insurance for the elderly as Medicare does. (That’s the PolitiFact argument.) On the other hand, the reforms would change the program fundamentally. Its nature as guaranteed government-provided social insurance would be lost.

But here’s a test that shows the essential semantic nature of this dispute: If the Republicans called their “new Medicare” program “ElderCare” instead and left everything else the same, PolitiFact would have to concede that Republicans had indeed voted to “end Medicare.”

We crave impartial judges, and fact-check sites such as PolitFact are extremely valuable during a time when the impartiality of basically all media institutions is being questioned. But political arguments have deep roots and resonances – especially those surrounding Medicare. Fact-checkers claiming impartiality owe it to us not just to apply an arbitrary, back-of-the-envelope standard of what makes Medicare “Medicare.” They must take Medicare’s history seriously, and explain the sophisticated  rhetorical stratagems being employed that attempt to elide – or to exploit – that history. Making sense of this requires more explanation of what’s at stake, a narrative, even – not a binary choice and a catchy label. It’s not that either-or choices and labels are never useful in explaining complex topics. But entitlement politics resembles three-dimensional chess.

By announcing its “objective” answer to a question with no objective answer, PolitiFact didn’t clarify this most important of issues, it muddied it. As Josh Marshall points out here, its “pants on fire” ruling has fueled juvenile coverage on the “debate about the debate.” The actual impacts of Medicare retrenchment? Not so much.

But there’s another issue here. This post – which took shots at Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis – was also reminiscent of Bill Keller’s attack on Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post. As Bercovici’s subject was citizen journalism – or journalism outside the old media cartel and its values and standards – Keller’s subject was aggregation. The problem here is that “aggregation” wasn’t Arianna’s idea. It is a technological and economic feature of the web as it currently exists. It’s very easy to set up a website or an app and pull in content from many sources. This is a useful service. Sometimes this occurs illegally, and/or without permission, and the HuffPo has done some things with NYT content that the NYT doesn’t appreciate. But if that’s really the problem, a magazine column isn’t the place to deal with it.

By personalizing the issue, Keller trivialized it. Aggregation is a force that that legacy media must grapple with. (Indeed, the NYT does some aggregating of its own.) Markets, technology, clicks and eyeballs aren’t personal. Attacking individuals instead of acknowledging this reality is unserious. The problem here is oversimplifying and anthropomorphizing complex forces, putting a human face on uncontrollable trends the writer disdains. This a common feature of politics – which should tell you something. It’s a terrible way to do journalism. For journalists, anecdotes can carry great power, but in each of these instances the anecdote collapses under the weight of the subject it’s supposed to exemplify. The broader problem here is viewing new media from a position that is simultaneously both defensive and dismissive. That is not a good frame of mind to bring to bear on a rapidly emerging global economic and social phenomenon. The forces being unleashed by new media and social media are formidable. And for journalists, worthy of respect and a sincere effort to understand them. Even if they piss you off.

Jared Lee Loughner’s motives are obscure, but it’s hard to disentangle the shooting of a Congresswoman, and the killing of a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl, and four other people from the political culture that it occurred in, an environment of exaggerated divisions, the demonization of opponents as socialists or traitors, and a lot of gun rhetoric, gun imagery, and … guns. Almost certainly, history will tie the two together no matter what we learn about Loughner in the coming weeks. Political madness is a recurring strain American history in which, on some level, we all take part: “I shouted out/Who killed the Kennedys?/When after all/It was you and me.”

So, this is a collective problem. Pinning blame won’t really work, because we end up back in the workings of Loughner’s mind, which we don’t understand right now, and may never. We’re probably not going to find some triggering phrase in all the millions of nasty political words spoken in the past couple of years, either. See Ken Silber’s reasoned take on rhetoric. Clearly, for instance, Sarah Palin was not inciting violence with her “rifle sights” (or “surveyor’s symbol”) graphic, crass and obnoxious as it was. Sharron Angle, with her “Second Amendment remedies” quote, came right up to that line, however. But it’s doubtful Loughner was paying much attention to a Nevada Senate race.

But we can identify some trends that created an atmosphere of exaggerated rhetoric and imagery that portrays political opponents as at best illegitimate and at worst, enemies of America, that suggests tyranny and/or subversion are sources of our current political predicament, demanding some kind of armed response. In a culture where some have viewed spraying gunfire at innocent people as a ticket to immortality, it’s not a healthy trend.

As Paul Krugman points out, the outre rhetoric is at the moment a overwhelmingly a feature of the right. (That doesn’t mean it always was, or always will be. But right now, the notion of left-right symmetry in this area doesn’t hold up.) One source of this is the right’s highly effective media-political complex, in which pro-Republican, anti-Democrat messages are tested, amplified and circulated with efficiency and alacrity. Cable talking heads and radio hosts compete to be outrageous, and are rewarded with attention and piles of cash the more outrageous they are.

Over the past two years, the short-term advantages of stoking the Republican base have created perverse incentives for politicians to go all-in with the outrage derby. Political leaders who are supposed to know better have mostly remained silent because all of this was working. The political media, which worships the appearance of mastery and aggression, mostly went along. It was politics, it was metaphorical, anything goes. In the process, they defined deviancy down.

As with the dysfunctional workings of Congress, this reflects an erosion not just of bipartisan comity and civility but of basic, shared standards that American politics have operated on for decades. It’s a symptom of a deeper breakdown that we’re now grappling with, none too effectively. One way to start to fix it would be to take a deep breath and start thinking before speaking. Maybe this is that opportunity.

Thanks to all for reading and commenting. To follow my work post-T/S, the best thing to do is to follow me on Twitter. There’s also my own website/blog. My blogging will show up there and also at the Huffington Post, the Guardian and other venues.

I refer to the WikiLeaks release of a trove of 92,000 U.S. documents detailing efforts of the U.S. Army and Special Forces in the war in Afghanistan, published simultaneously with interpretive accounts from the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. As soon as this went up, you could feel the ground shifting under the media and governments: their traditional relationships were suddenly upended by this new architecture of information flows. From anonymous leakers to seemingly invulnerable transnational secret-exposing organization to journalists and to the public.

To those who say “there’s nothing new here,” I suppose that’s right in the general sense. But if you read some of these documents (or their excerpts), I don’t think they are so easily dismissed as old news. They paint a vivid picture of a daily reality that is absurdly complex, baffling and possibly hopeless. The sensation you get from reading through them is different than if you just read the words ”complex, baffling and hopeless.” More different than if you read a policy paper on it. And more different still than if you watch the Pentagon’s daily briefings. There’s no substitute for primary sources, and the volume of information and breadth of topics creates an overwhelming sense of the drift of the war effort.

Does this represent an emergent form of journalism? C.W. Anderson argues that it does:

This captures the essence of the question I was trying to get at in the fifth point of yesterday’s post (“journalism in the era of big data”). I noted the similarities between “War Logs” and last week’s big bombshell, “Top Secret America.” The essence of the similarity, I said, was that they were based on reams of data, which, in sum, might not tell us anything shockingly new but that brought home, in Ryan Sholin’s excellent phrase, “the weight of failure.” And this gets me excited because I think it represents something new in journalism, or something old-enough-to-new: a focus on the aggregation of a million “on the ground reports” that might sometimes get us closer to the truth than three well placed sources over a nice off-the-record dinner.

Going forward, we’re going to get more info-troves like this one. They will sit out there on the web and in our mental landscapes: 92,000 documents here, 1.3 million data points there, saying something important. And some will so overwhelmingly point in one direction that merely posting them will accomplish the basic journalistic goal of conveying something new (or at least something people haven’t seen before). And that should influence the public debate.

However, a lot of data – most of it, really – is not nearly as clear-cut as the Afghanistan reports. It’s often ambiguous and contradictory on the surface, with the alarming pattern one or two levels down. Or an apparently scoop-worthy data point may turn out to mean something entirely different in light of a deeper understanding. To find its true value you need to interpret, provide context. And then what if the interpretation is skewed? As Marc Lynch writes, there was a somewhat similar data dump of Saddam-era Iraqi documents during the Bush administration:

This use of the WikiLeaks documents brings back some old memories, of a long time ago (March 2006) in a galaxy far far away when the Pentagon posted a massive set of captured Iraqi documents on the internet without context. Analysts dived into them, mostly searching for a smoking gun on Iraqi WMD or ties to al-Qaeda. The right-wing blogs and magazines ran with a series of breathless announcements that something had been found proving one case or another. Each finding would dissolve when put into context or subjected to scrutiny, and at the end it only further confirmed the consensus (outside of the fever swamps, at least) that there had been no significant ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But the cumulative effect of each “revelation”, even if subsequently discredited, probably fueled the conviction that such ties had existed and did help maintain support for the Iraq war among the faithful.

A huge cache of data, especially documents (each a story in itself), will invariably spawn competing “narratives” about its meaning, especially in an era when old media models of authority are breaking down. Some of these narratives will be lies. And sometimes the truths will simply be glossed over or forgotten.

That’s why this is a great moment for journalism, and also a perilous one. Anderson continues:

“[F]inding something new” (being there, being at dinner, getting the source to say something we didn’t know before) may not always be as important as finding the pattern in what is there already.

This is a variation on a basic idea of investigative journalism that I wrote about recently: “In government, the real scandal is usually not what’s illegal, but legal and routine: the day-to-day status quo that, when examined closely by fresh eyes, turns out to be something monstrous.” (This approach takes a backseat to the “get people indicted” school of investigations – but that may be changing, and it ought to.) Certainly, the Afghan documents are monstrous enough on their own. But often it’s not enough to post the data and let it speak for itself: it must be marshaled in service to a story, an argument. That’s what historians do; journalists now have ever-greater opportunities to do the same.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I’d like to elaborate on my previous post on the recent spate of wild and/or false racism charges emanating from the Breitbarts and Megyn Kellys of the world. It was glib to ignore the longstanding complaints of conservatives about reverse discrimination.

First, for the sake of argument, some perspective: the United States has a brutal historical legacy of slavery and legalized oppression of African-Americans. It has gradually been mitigated, legally, politically, and socially, a process that continues. This process is one of the things that makes America great. But the legacy hasn’t disappeared, it remains a pernicious force in American society. There is, comparatively speaking, no significant legacy or history of black-on-white discrimination. There are black people who are prejudiced against white people, of course. Statistically speaking, some of them probably work for government agencies. But that’s not evidence of systemic anti-white discrimination.

However. The great liberal project that reached a pinnacle with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s produced a wave of changes in the way governments and private entities did business. It also produced policies (racial and ethnic quotas, busing, disparate impact laws and regulations, affirmative action) that, unlike, say, ensuring the right to vote, were debatable – and were debated, in the courts and the political arena. And all this produced massive social stresses that have shaped American politics ever since. (And that’s not even mentioning other issues, such as welfare, that were not race-based but became politically racialized.)

All of this is to say, the anger about alleged anti-white racism that we see on the right – and the reason Breitbart is able to generate the reactions he does – is not the result of paranoia or fantasy. It is an understandable product of the politics of the past 50 years.

But most of the political shocks wrought by the Great Society and liberalism in the 1970s through the 1990s have already worked their way through the system; white flight; the South going Republican, welfare reform. To put it another way: in the past, when white conservatives were outraged about race issues, it was because those issues affected millions of people directly, and resonated for tens of millions more. Busing or affirmative action, for example. Liberal sanctimony and self-righteousness only made things worse.

Today, attempts by Breitbart and Fox News to gin up similar outrage are isolated incidents painted as broad conspiracies that don’t stand up to serious examination. If the New Black Panthers are the best they’ve got, it’s a sign that as a driving force of American politics, as a “wedge issue,” anger over anti-white discrimination is a shadow (a pale one!) of what it once was. They’re shaping news cycles with this stuff, not electoral coalitions. Just as 1990s-era political correctness on the left (and that diversity workshop I attended) was weak, er, tea compared with what had come before, so are today’s racism faux-scandals.

This is not to say that as matters of law and policy, all questions of race have been settled. Far from it. But those questions are not currently driving national politics. (And the focus on culture war outrages is actually undermining the conservative policy agenda on this front.)

Because race is still an inescapable issue in American society, and the legacy of centuries of racism lingers, and the whiff of liberal sanctimony never quite disperses, this remains a raw spot on the national psyche, easily exploited by unscrupulous media hucksters. But the underlying weakness of their efforts is actually kind of encouraging.

classified and sources reluctant to talk), the conceptualizing, writing, and shaping of it all are very difficult. Outside criticism never quite captures the depth of the effort.

The Washington Post has done a great service in putting all this information into the public domain. We’re in an era when secrecy for its own sake, rather than to ensure safety and security, is an endemic problem. The series’s database, maps, and the stories themselves are a portrait of 21st century government-out-of-control, shielded from bureaucratic and political accountability. The implications are staggering. By pushing this out there, the Post can provide the germ of a genuine public debate on this topic. Right now, there isn’t one. That’s the essence of journalism.

Yet in other ways, the series doesn’t quite deliver – at least not what I have come to expect from a big investigative series from the Washington Post. In government, the real scandal is usually not what’s illegal, but legal and routine: the day-to-day status quo that, when examined closely by fresh eyes, turns out to be something monstrous. This is an obvious case of that. When you read something like this, the result of two years of digging, you expect your sensibilities to be shocked and your expectations undermined. But what we got was more of a mildly alarming, broad-brush portrait of the way things are now: the gradual breakdown of bureaucratic order and accountability as the intelligence community expanded post 9/11. It may be making us less safe, though this is disputed. Some people in government view this as a problem and are trying to address it. Others don’t. There are entire suburbs for secretive agencies and corporate contractors, which have a lot of of money and good schools.

A deep dive like this, you want something more than a broad-brush portrait of a system: you want to know how it got out of control, what interest groups and political entities benefit from the status quo and thwart reform, what some of the system’s worst and emblematic excesses are. And what it all means. The series outlines a dangerous breakdown in accountability without an immediate solution, government “bigness” beyond anyone’s control – and mysteriously stops there. But what are the implications for domestic spying, for democracy, for my own life? When you immerse yourself in material like this, you develop deep insights and can draw strong conclusions. The Post never quite gets there. To put it another way, I don’t think they’re quaking in their boots out in those new office suites in Herndon.

There’s also the issue of crediting earlier reporting on this topic, notably that of Tim Shorrock,  P.W. Singer and James Bamford. (Full disclosure: Shorrock is a friend.) The Post should have tipped its hat to them somehow. The journalism etiquette on this type of thing is very nuanced, perhaps ridiculously so. For the purposes of having an impact on public debate and, well, history, a newspaper will try to claim a kind of “ownership” of a topic when it does a huge investigation. There are, to be blunt, Pulitzer Prizes at stake. The problem is, you’re never going to own a story like this one. The topic is too broad and too well-known. And this is the Internet age, the era of links and collaboration and iteration. Nobody has an exclusive claim on anything, really. Even if you push the story to a new level of depth, failing to acknowledge earlier work ends up looking not just high-handed, but strange.

Update: Tim Shorrock on where he believes the series misses the mark.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I went through a mandatory two-day course of diversity training. The newspaper management required it for all editorial employees after concerted lobbying by African-Americans on the staff who complained of a lot of casual racism in the newsroom. Lord knows, they were right: there was a lot of casual racism. Sexism too.

But the diversity course was bizarre. I hope they don’t still do it this way: The facilitators were true-believing leftists (ironically working to help corporations avoid being sued). They took it as their mission to convince everyone of the deep-seated oppression of American society towards minorities and women, and the role that white males played in victimizing everyone else. This was done through various exercises in which we were asked to talk about our personal lives and encounters with people of different ethnic backgrounds from ourselves. Our anecdotes were then squeezed into this oppression narrative. The idea was to get white people to see it all from the other side – or else. Some participants found the sharing to be alarming and inappropriate – it was painful to watch them fumble through it. I had recently been covering Latin America, and pointed out that systemic oppression was significantly worse in, say, Guatemala, where you could be killed for your opinions, your ethnicity, or both.

I write this not to complain, but to note that this was basically an earlier iteration of the cycle of stupid that has captured the media this summer on the question of America and race.

Just as my diversity workshop tried to simplistically rig things one way (whites are oppressors, blacks are victims) Andrew Brietbart and others on the right are trying to rig things the other way (blacks are oppressors, whites are victims). It’s a mirror image of the left’s “oppression narrative” – only without actual oppression.

Recently, I got into a brief Twitter exchange with a conservative who was outraged over the New Black Panthers case and the notion that the Obama administration might not be going down the middle, prosecuting blacks suppressing the white vote with a fervor equal to that it displays when the races are reversed. It was brief because it was a ridiculous conversation. He seemed unaware that there is, historically and statistically speaking, no black suppression of white voters in the United States. It is simply not a problem. Even the NBP case dealt with a brief incident in a majority black district; no white voter has come forward to complain of being scared away from the polls. Suppressing the black vote, on the other hand, has a long and ugly history and is still not unheard of.

In the same way, the case of Shirley Sherrod, advanced by the irresponsible Breitbart as a case of racism, illustrates the opposite: it is the story of an African-American who overcame her own prejudices and difficult personal history and helped people different from her.

The problem with the diversity workshop was ultimately in its attempt to compel people to change their thinking. The notion that your employer could do that, or attempt to, is repellent. What’s going on now has even less to do with race relations. And, like back then, everything to do with power.

Just as those true-believing facilitators wielded power conferred by a corporation to pound ideas into our heads, the right is using its media echo chamber to settle scores and reinforce its own “oppression narrative” in which black racism is a major national problem, and in which racism is not measured by material facts, but by what’s allegedly in your head. Here’s what Breitbart told TPM even after it came out that his Sherrod video clip, in context, conveyed the opposite of his original claim: “I think the video speaks for itself. The way she’s talking about white people … is conveying a present tense racism in my opinion. But racism is in the eye of the beholder.”

The good news here is that these faux-scandals are so thin on substance and so short-lived that few Americans are going to notice. They have the feel of late-stage culture warfare, in which the original sources of outrage and grievance have dried up. So the warriors must search for, and manufacture, more.

Image via Wikipedia

The Washington Post’s series on the metastasizing U.S. intelligence community is an excellent piece of reporting, and illustrates how the day-to-day flux of American politics and ideological debates are becoming increasingly disengaged from what is actually happening in the world (if they ever were engaged at all).

What’s sad about this series – at least, the first installment – is how unsurprising it is.  Tim Shorrock and others have reported on this trend for years. But even if you were unaware of the details that the Post so expertly catalogues, the broad contours of what’s happening have long been obvious. The United States has a vast and growing secret security apparatus whose structure no one understands, that is in effect accountable to no one.

This is a two-headed beast where each head doesn’t know what the other is doing. It is a recipe for all kinds of abuses and snafus. (My own modest foray into the shadow world of contracting a few years ago showed an impossibly complex bureaucratic web around a tiny, incompetently managed spyplane program.) Precisely because lines of authority are crossed and muddled, it’s easy for those responsible to escape being held accountable. That is, if we even hear about it. In such a system the primary aim of government secrecy often ceases to be the national security and becomes a tool of CYA and turf protection.

This state of affairs is both outrageous and dangerous, and yet there is no particular political impetus right now to rein this in, to make our intelligence apparatus behave in a sensible, effective way, or even to understand it better.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Post-9/11, the United States cannot spend too much, politically speaking, on security. If a politician voices skepticism about where all that money’s going, s/he risks attack for being insufficiently vigilant about America’s security. Terrorism aside, such a system becomes self-perpetuating: money in politics attracts more money, some of which goes to lobbyists whose job it is to protect and expand that money flow. And this is one giant gravity well of federal dollars.

This is a classic problem of runaway big government, compounded by the out-of-control growth of private contracting. Yet we don’t hear Republicans complaining about it. It’s a threat to civil liberties and the reputation of government itself, yet we don’t hear a peep from Democrats either.

One omission of the Post series thus far is an assessment of what the long-term problems of such a system will be (besides straightforward bureaucratic confusion and waste). The story identifies the role of bureaucratic snarls in failing to anticipate terror attacks by individuals, but to be honest, those are always a bit hard to judge.

Glenn Greenwald identifies some of these problems – shadowy, powerful security agencies taking aim at Americans; a breakdown in security priorities; a decline in security itself. What I think is likely to happen in the short run is the inexorable growth of the incompetent security state – the no-fly list times a thousand. At some point abuses and snafus will break out into the open, and Congress will attempt some kind of reform. But it appears this system may already be un-reformable.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It’s a cruel summer for Democrats, and the media are filled with analyses of what’s gone wrong with the Obama presidency.

The main problem with these pieces is that they soft-pedal the real, and really the only, reason that Obama’s approval rating is low (and it isn’t even that low – Pollster.com’s “poll of polls” puts it 46.1 percent, compared to 48.3 percent who disapprove). Generally speaking, the broad American public barely follows politics, especially in a non-presidential election year. For instance, I’d bet that most people have never heard of the “New Black Panthers.” Americans do, however, respond to objective economic conditions, and those are very bad right now. It’s a wonder Obama’s approval isn’t a lot lower.

The media still assume that when Obama gives a speech, or meets with some foreign leader, or that when the oil well gets capped, the public opinion needle moves. Maybe it does, for a short while, though such movements are hard to separate from noise. The fallacy is the assumption that enough speeches and salesmanship and short-term political victories and gaffes by opponents can move the needle of public opinion almost anywhere, and that political ninja skills can keep it there. That’s just not true, as Brendan Nyhan points out in a post critiquing a piece by Slate’s John Dickerson:

In reality, however, there’s no evidence that Obama has become any less effective as a salesman — as I’ve repeatedly pointed out over the years (e.g. here, here, here, and here), presidents can rarely generate significant shifts in public opinion in support of their domestic policy agenda. Obama’s failure to generate increased support for the stimulus and health care is not the least bit surprising, especially given the political environment in which he’s operating.

The larger problem with this analysis is that Dickerson is constructing a post hoc narrative about Obama’s poll numbers using the epistemology of journalism, which treats tactics as the dominant causal force in politics. Within that worldview, if Obama’s numbers used to be high and they are now low, the only logical conclusion is that “his ability to persuade and change minds is seriously damaged.” The idea that Obama’s numbers have declined across the board in large part due to the state of the economy is only briefly acknowledged (“or [the public] can’t hear [Obama] over the bad economic news”).

But if the president’s day-to-day statements, speeches and photo ops truly have virtually no electoral consequences, what are journalists supposed to cover? What would happen if the media based its assumptions for covering politics on the way politics actually worked?

For political media, it’s all about election results. The goal is to tell us what actions today will shape tomorrow’s elections and longer-term electoral coalitions, and ultimately what that means for people. If they really wanted to do that accurately, reporters would have to change their assumptions and upgrade their technical skills. Here are a few suggestions:

-Put political tactics in perspective. A news cycle full of Gibbs quips, Biden gaffes, gotcha questions, the outrage-of-the-day, anything Sarah Palin says or does, etc. tells us little. In general, political reporters should be more skeptical about the agency of presidential aides and political strategists in influencing public opinion and voting. I’m not saying ignore the tactical stuff – just assign it something less than the world-historical importance it now has. That will be tough, though, because most political reporters fancy themselves political strategists, and envy the real ones. But in fact, the slavish devotion to “savvy” and the conventional wisdom of the moment tends to circumscribe debates and limit political options. It’s all very meta, and one reason why the reason the system is broken.

-Understand public opinion and polling. Reporters should be able to explain how voters really respond to economic changes and political trends. Right now, most can’t, or won’t. Reference: fivethirtyeight.com.

-Focus on what the government actually does. If elections are determined mostly by economic conditions, political reporters should focus more on the levers of economic policy, examining what Obama, Congress and the Fed are, and could be, doing to boost economic growth and employment. This would, however, require a level of literacy in the subject matter that most political journalists do not have, and also a willingness to challenge statements and assumptions by politicians about the economy that they’re not currently in the habit of doing. But if the political press corps were more economically literate, and used that literacy intelligently, the level of BS in our political debates might actually fall.