Instead, one of his offenses was … dancing, maybe a little strangely, at a wedding. This was truly a feeding frenzy worthy of a Seinfeld episode.

Seriously, Weigel is a talented journalist who added a fresh perspective to the Washington Post. He should not have been booted out for what he did. Why was he? The Weigel Incident does illustrate some of the biggest fault lines and flaws of Washington journalism. Here are a few:

1. Fake decorum dominates our political discourse.
This exists solely so that people can score political points by taking offense. Often, though not exclusively, those taking offense these days tend to be Republicans and conservatives who have discovered the advantages of the left’s equally lame 1990s-era political correctness.

The stuff Weigel posted on the private Journolist email list was mostly snark – some of it funny, some nasty. He was injudicious to post it – nothing is truly secret on the Internet, and it’s in his own interest to be, if not neutral, credible. But it should be possible to mock Matt Drudge, apologize, and still write on the conservative movement. No doubt there are some conservatives who do not consider Drudge an unalloyed force for good for America or politics on the right. Because he isn’t.

Once you violate decorum your enemies, and the enemies of whatever power center you represent, will come for your scalp. And the media will pile on and abet this, because nothing generates more traffic than fake umbrage (except, sometimes, genuine umbrage). But maybe it will all blow over, especially if your patrons take the long view, and have your back. Unless, of course, everyone just agrees to go with the whole fake decorum thing.

2. The “print guys won” at the Washington Post.
The exact mechanics of Weigel’s departure are unclear, but it does seem clear that if Post editors wanted to keep him, they could have torn up his resignation letter. Instead, they cut him loose. And some inside the Post are reveling in this as a great victory, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, who published some quotes of Post staffers crowing about the whole thing:

“This is not just sour grapes about the sudden rise of these untrained kids, though I have to think that some people in the building resent them for bypassing the usual way people rise here. This is really about the serial stupidity of allowing these bloggers to trade on the name of the Washington Post.”

“It makes me crazy when I see these guys referred to as reporters. They’re anything but. And they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters.”

The backstory here is the internal struggle between the print and online sides that the “print guys” famously won when the two were consolidated. As a result the paper’s embrace of the web has at times been ambiguous.

The print side is built on traditions like sending reporters to cover the city or suburbs before they’re allowed near national politics. Weigel never paid those dues. As a practical matter, though, the Post ought to be able to assign talented, well-sourced political reporters to cover, well, politics, without first making them cover the Howard County zoning board for eight years.

3. The “view from nowhere” retains its grip on the political press.
But the burning issue here is whether Washington Post reporters can have opinions, and if they do, how should they express them? Weigel came out of the world of blogging and Washington’s independent political journalism community (the libertarian Reason and the left-leaning Washington Independent). The writing is looser, shaped by a personal perspective/politics. I think this is the future, in part because it’s more honest and accessible. The traditional “view from nowhere” that posits the truth lies midway between left and right is an untenable construct, especially in an age of shocking institutional failures. Clinging to it is eroding the credibility of traditional media.

But the world outside the warm embrace of objectivity looks dangerous to those still inside it, especially if there’s any ambiguity about what team you’re on. Politico’s Ben Smith wrote a piece before Weigel’s resignation broke that basically stated: if you are one of these journalists-with-opinions, you have to choose a side. If you don’t, we’ll choose one for you. Weigel, you’re a liberal. This is preposterous for two reasons: first, Weigel says he’s not a liberal. (And indeed, there is little evidence for ideological liberalism in his snark; rather, it’s contempt for individuals and conservative strategy/tactics – blunt, yes, but honest.) Second, a journalist (or, for that matter, anybody) ought to be able to hold opinions without actually joining a political movement. This describes most Americans, after all.

Sadly, it appears that an unholy alliance between culture warriors and journalism traditionalists has won the day here, and Washington journalism is weaker for it. At least until Weigel turns up at the Huffington Post.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m late to this, but it’s not going away, so here’s my question: Is Matt Taibbi merely a journalistic scourge, or also a scourge on journalism itself? The question isn’t just about Taibbi, but about the state of journalism and America right now, post-bubble, post Iraq war, post-Bush.

You probably know the background: Taibbi has written a couple of searing cover stories for Rolling Stone on the financial shenanigans of Goldman Sachs over the past century and on the Obama administration’s close ties to Goldman and Wall Street and its halting attempts to reform the banking system.

These pieces are, unlike most stories that contain the word “Geithner,” actually fun to read and make a simple and compelling point: historically, and now, there is a tight nexus between the elite banks and uppermost reaches of the federal government – whether it’s run by Republicans or Democrats. This has proven to be catastrophic. Its persistence after the disaster of 2008 is a significant structural problem for the American economy – and, by extension, the global economy. Obama’s diffidence on the matter is one of the great mysteries of his presidency, given the both the substantive problem and the political advantages to taking on the bankers, which would theoretically appeal both to liberals and the tea party crowd.

Taibbi indicts not just Goldman, but the system. And that system is, well, highly indictable. But on the way, he overreaches. He imbues his villains with more agency than they deserve. He makes mistakes. So some journalists have been actively fisking Taibbi, including Megan McArdle at the Atlantic, Tim Fernholz at the American Prospect, Heidi Moore and Paul Smalera at the Big Money, Smalera here at T/S. And Chris Lehmann and Felix Salmon have been fisking the fiskers. In a Twitter exchange with NYU’s Jay Rosen, I got hung up on these questions: Can you be right on the big issues if your facts are wrong? Or is the business media engaging the small issues at the expense of the big and truly important ones? After all (with a few exceptions) the business media didn’t alert us to the financial insanity of the housing bubble before it burst.

If you want to indict the system, you need to build a case. And that case should be based on facts. So I agree with Taibbi’s critics that he is playing a bit fast-and-loose, and that in a strict empirical sense, this calls his entire thesis into question. So, Matt – do a better job. Get your Jamie Rubins straight. Explain your chosen financial instruments correctly. But do his mistakes indicate that on the whole, Taibbi has no idea what he’s talking about? I am not a financial journalist, but I don’t think so. The “Taibbi fact-check” seems like kind of a sideshow to me, an approach that doesn’t really get at what Taibbi is doing, what it means, and whether it is right or effective journalism.

The second complaint is about framing: By putting Goldman Sachs as the center of his narratives, Taibbi presents a distorted picture of history, the financial system, Goldman’s own role in various bubbles and the nature of bubbles themselves, which by definition are not the fault of a single entity but a of an entire marketplace. But I don’t read his pieces that way. In individual instances he may inflate Goldman’s role. But if you are even halfway-informed about bubbles and finance, you will realize that Goldman is just swimming with the current, and helping to propel it – but so are dozens of other actors. And that context makes his pieces that much scarier: if Goldman really were the singular villain here, fixing the problem would theoretically be easier. But Goldman is just emblematic.

The real problem here isn’t one journalist, but journalism itself. The U.S. media’s neutral, non-ideological form of reporting reached its apogee in terms of political influence and number of practitioners post-Watergate and pre-9/11. But during that time, its reach and credibility among the public were also steadily declining due to – you name it: fragmentation, failing business models, culture wars, growing structural and demographic political divisions. Government (and governing itself) came under sustained assault, and its regulatory and political checks on business – never all that strong – have been weakened.

Taibbi peels back the layers on this and shows it to be outrageous. Whether you are a liberal or a free-marketeer, it is clear something big has gone wrong in the business-government nexus. If you’re going to part ways with Taibbi over his factual blunders or framing, that’s legit. But it still leaves the big question hanging out there – is his outrage misplaced?

But post-Watergate pre-9/11 journalism doesn’t traffic in outrage. Take Watergate. Facts and digging – often against the tide of conventional wisdom – exposed the true extent of the Watergate scandal and brought Nixon down. This event has shaped much of the generation of investigative journalism that followed: the Platonic ideal is to get someone indicted, to resign, or both. The problem with this is that its assumptions are essentially naive: that the system basically works, or can work once the facts come out. But what if it doesn’t work, or cannot? What if what’s most shocking and unjust is what’s perfectly legal? Also: what if, in society, there’s no consensus on what’s shocking and unjust?

These questions tend to drive practitioners of empirical journalism (and I count myself among them) crazy. If the system doesn’t work, you have to make some value judgments. If you make value judgments, though, people who disagree with you will attack you as biased. Which can’t be, because we’re trained to be cool and detached, to convince people through rational argument, to reach for universal approbation of our conclusions. But this goal, always elusive, is now nearly impossible. Should that stop us from investigating? Or making judgments?

But that’s now it works in practice. The establishment media is, after all, tied up with government and business itself in various ways. If those things aren’t “working” the media has trouble grasping the failure. To do so would be “controversial.” It would invalidate the hoped-for universal approbation! Better to keep your head down, withhold judgment.

These tensions can drive the media to forest-for-the-trees absurdities. Take the debate over whether to call “enhanced interrogation techniques” “torture.” The New York Times, NPR and other outlets have engaged in odd verbal gymnastics to avoid calling something what it self-evidently is. All ultimately in service not to any empirical truth but to the legal and historical interests of the politicians and appointees who engineered the interrogation policy – and have build an edifice of spin around it to obscure the facts.

The travails of the banking system are not directly comparable with “enhanced interrogation,” obviously. Except that in one sense: They require journalists to question their basic assumptions about how, and whether, government works. The Nixon problem could be addressed (if not “solved”) by digging up the truth and letting the system do its work. No longer. Too often, though, mainstream journalism just won’t ask these questions because they are too knotty, too complex, too dangerous for institutions already under siege to take on. My advice, though, is to get comfortable with outrage: it’s pointing somewhere interesting.

Here’s my problem with Taibbi, though. He is a polemicist, and a polemic has its uses. But it’s a lot easier to indict the system after that system has already failed. And his polemics don’t explain what’s really happening, or why. But if you read his pieces, there’s not much explanatory power: it’s just a bunch of assholes doing self-interested things and the weak and/or evil politicians who enable them. That is, of course, unsurprising. It’s human nature. But “human nature” doesn’t tell us where the system went wrong, what the incentives are, what the politics are that enforce the status quo and block reform. What are the politics of taking on the banking system? How did things get so bad? Have they always been that way? (Call this the “Al Swearengen school of democratic capitalism.”)

I remember reading an old “Doonesbury” strip in which Duke is engaged in some scheme and he remarks on that there’s no rules, everybody is out for himself, the American dream is just a big scam: “It’s my time!” he declares. This seemed to capture something larger that was unfolding at the time, and has since flourished a thousandfold. And I want to know more about it.

“Neutrality” of the kind sought by traditional media outlets such as the Post is supposed to emulate the scientific method – a cool elucidation of facts from a messy reality.

Here’s how the “neutral” stance theoretically works: There’s a political process between competing interests in society; journalists play an important role in that by explaining what’s happening, exposing wrongdoing, hypocrisy, etc.  So far so good. The foundation of this approach is the civics-book idea that on some level, we’ll remember that we’re all in this crazy democratic experiment together, we share the same values, and thus will look for honest brokers – journalists – to help us understand what’s happening.

But it’s been clear for a while that this goal is illusory. The era of the media-as-honest broker is over. The Washington Post and other establishment organs just haven’t realized it yet.

To be an honest broker, people must view you as trustworthy. But the traditional media long ago lost the trust of large swaths of the public. Why? Well, that’s a whole Ph.D. thesis. But look at some of the events of the past 40 years – Watergate, Vietnam, 9/11, Katrina. Political institutions lost public trust. The media were and are part of the political ecosystem and played a role in that loss. They enabled massive screwups and trafficked in cynicism (see the runup to the Iraq war and all political coverage from 1988 on). Moreover, Tom Edsall argues in CJR that the increasingly educated and liberal demographics of media employees skewed coverage away from, and at times against, the concerns of conservative, working class Americans. And Steve Buttry writes about how the elevation of neutrality came at the expense of other important journalistic values.

Unlike the political system, which kicks people and parties out of office from time to time, the media didn’t self-correct. It doubled down on neutrality – not just as a journalism methodology but as a cocoon: we stand outside and above what’s going on, and thus don’t have to seriously examine our role in it.

Without trust, an honest broker is just a broker, with no privileged claim on the truth.

But this is actually a good thing. It means you have to compete in a vast, ever-growing marketplace with a lot of other “truths” – some of them lies. Contending in that marketplace is one of the basic functions of journalism. If media outlets insist on trying to be neutral arbiters between political interests – without examining who and what those interests represent or if their arguments are credible – they’ll continue to inch toward irrelevance.

But what does a post-neutral world look like? Edsall’s solution – “We’re liberal – but objective!” – doesn’t sound promising. Nor do I buy the “slippery slope” argument: that all journalists end up wearing their opinions on their sleeves, that their work devolves into advocacy, that we all end up screaming at each other (that is, more than we do already).

There is room for all kinds of journalism. Talking Points Memo seems to do well enough combining smart reporting with a liberal perspective. That said, I don’t think the Washington Post or New York Times should become TPM – or, to cite a more apt example, the Guardian. Such an abrupt change would be jarring and out of character.

Rather, it would help simply to back off and see what happens. You know, evolve. Stop loudly proclaiming and enforcing neutrality and let the work speak for itself. Allow more, not less, flexibility in how journalists can express themselves. As a journalist, I don’t think my opinions about political issues are particularly interesting – unless I have knowledge or have done research about a topic and actually have something material to say about it. In that case, being able to comment on it and engage the public makes for better journalism. And good journalism that asks and answers important questions should be able to withstand partisan or ideological criticism.

The NYT Picker covers the New York Times, making ample use of sources on the inside. It’s interesting and entertaining. No doubt many at the NYT would love to know who’s behind it. But except as the topic of a New York media gossip parlor game, we don’t need to know, and we probably benefit more from not knowing. Attempting to out the author(s) serves no journalistic purpose.

In the blogosphere, you don’t out an anonyous blogger just because you don’t like him. In June, NRO’s Ed Whelan outed Publius, who blogs on Obsidian Wings, because of a heated ideological disagreement over the Supreme Court. He thought better of it and apologized. The NYT’s Opinionator blog handily summarized what happened and explored the issues of anonymous and pseudonymous blogging. Personally, I prefer transparency wherever possible. But bloggers can have many reasons to shield their identities – personal, professional. If the blogging itself is good, and anonymity not used as a vehicle for scurrilous attacks, clearly the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it now NYT policy that if you’re blogging anonymously, it’s fair game for Times journalists to try to ferret out your identity? There’s apparently not much sympathy for anonymity in the NYT ranks. Randy Cohen, the Times’s “Ethicist” writer, recently argued that the online environment has become so toxic that anonymity should be discouraged. And referencing the NYT Picker issue, Times social media chief Jen Preston tweeted that “Reporters embarrassed by their work remove their bylines and hide: cowards.”

The NYT owes us an explanation of what happened here (the Media Decoder’s flippant response – “What will NYTPick.com say about using anonymous sources to out anonymous bloggers? We may find out” – won’t cut it). Especially: is outing anonymous bloggers a legitimate journalistic pursuit, and if so, why?

Then I read the American Press Institute‘s Newspaper Economic Action Plan. It’s the same point of view I ran into on Facebook, only systematized and turned into a business strategy. The problem with this “we produce something of value and should be paid for it” attitude, though, is that it is just an attitude, one shaped by a sense of grievance and a gut feeling about what is – must be – right and just. This is a terrible way to formulate any kind of complex strategy – George W. Bush made decisions the same way. In this case, the API ignores the real world conditions of journalism, the Internet and e-commerce. Thus this strategy, if pursued, is unlikely to turn out well. I’m a former newspaper reporter – I want newspapers & journalism to survive and thrive. And I’m not against charging for some content if it’s done right. But even I can see this is crazy.

Start with the API’s first recommendation: “Establish a true value for news content online by charging for it.” This is a strange formulation. In a market, prices are set by supply and demand, not dictated by producers. The declaration has an anachronistic, command-and-control, almost Marxist feel to it: we control the means of production, we will set the prices. It assumes a kind of monopolistic position that newspapers no longer hold, as much as they might want to. If your starting point is the assumption your product has “value,” you’d be wise to take a hard look at exactly what that value is on the open market. But the API evidently has not conducted that kind of clear-eyed self-assessment. It sees the economic value of newspaper content as self-evident, of a piece with its perceived social value, and something that must be preserved first, improved upon later.

But the truth is that newspaper journalism has a relatively low market value and its social relevance is in decline. It’s still important – we need eyes on government at all levels, investigations, a space for local and national community discussions to play out. But the form of the newspaper story is stale, and the package it comes in – the selection of the day’s news, calendar, arts, classifieds, etc. – is something many people no longer really need because they can get most of it elsewhere. Meanwhile the relative social importance of newspaper stories – as a forum for political debates, say – has also declined due to ever-fragmenting attention, competition, and a loss of credibility that’s partly self-inflicted.

The API’s answer to this is to double down on existing, loyal newspaper fans: “The real value to newspapers comes from serving … ‘core loyalists,’ the group of heavy users who visit a news site about 18 days a month, two to three times a day. They contribute 85 percent of the page views and user sessions.” But surely this base is already in decline, unlikely to replaced by younger readers.

These problems are severe. The obvious solution to them is to make a better product – leverage the advantages you have, innovate, create something people really want, and thus make yourself important again – and figure out how to sell it. The marketplace of the open web is the ideal forum to test this out. (I acknowledge that many or most such tests will result in failure.) The API report makes some gestures toward innovation – but only after enumerating ways to monetize content. Its basic approach is, we’ve already got a golden goose here, people are stealing our eggs, and we want them back.

That’s the other principal problem – the report urges a crackdown on the cribbing of content by Google, aggregators and others: they should pay or cease and desist. There is plenty of abuse of “fair use,” and original content is endlessly atomized. Perhaps there are ways to police the egregious cases better and/or generate revenue from “republishing” if all are amenable. But is this really a wise foundation for a future-of-newspapers strategy? Here’s how the report envisions the politics:

Many citizens and policy makers regard newspapers as an essential part of the American democracy as evidenced by a recent congressional hearing and a spate of conferences. The sustainability of journalism is important to Americans, and thus, there is a public imperative to ensure, and monetize, the survival of professional news organizations in some form.

You can read this two ways. Either the newspaper industry has civic obligation to charge for content, or society itself must recognize the importance of newspaper content and compel politicians to protect it. The first idea is tendentious, the second naive. The public isn’t particularly sympathetic to tougher copyright enforcement. The lobbying clout of newspaper publishers and media companies is declining with their corporate valuations. Google has lots of money to spend on its own lobbyists. And the current copyright regime is outdated. When it’s reformed, who knows what will happen?

It’s not like the API report contains no good ideas. No doubt there are ways to charge for premium content as it suggests, for example. But your average small or medium-sized paper doesn’t have much (or any) of that, nor does the API give any examples of it. And if your strategy is shaped by an inflexible set of beliefs and an attitude of entitlement, it’s not a recipe for innovation or success. After reading this, I’m more pessimistic than ever about the future of newspapers.

Many newspapers and other traditional media outlets, fearful of the “liberal bias” charge and watching their audience disappear, have spent the past decade trying to build their credibility with conservatives. There’s nothing wrong with that per se –  they are run mostly by liberals, and we need conservative voices in the political debate. But those efforts went awry during the Bush administration. Confronted by an White House that was wildly overreaching on presidential power, surveillance, torture and the politicization of basic governance, most media lost their bearings. They treated these things as normal, if controversial, activities of government.

Fortunately, the political system self-corrected. But the media’s problems remain. Here is part of of editorial page editor Harold Jackson’s explanation for Yoo’s hiring:

He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.

But other providing a valuable forum for self-justification, I don’t understand what the op-ed page gains with Yoo. There are plenty of talented conservative writers out there. Yoo’s debut column is undistinguished conservative boilerplate.

The only reason Yoo is prominent enough to write a column in the Inquirer is because of his work in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Hiring him is thus is an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy the legal opinions he crafted there. But those opinions are legally suspect and morally repugnant. Yoo is an advocate of a questionable legal theory of nearly unlimited presidential power, and his memos were instrumental in providing legal cover for techniques that were, by any commonsense interpretation of the word, torture.

Yoo might be a war criminal. At the very least, Inquirer editors should engage that issue directly. Simply hiring him says: we don’t think so. This is an assent to the dangerous notion that if the U.S. government did it, no matter how reprehensible it might be, it must have some legitimacy. That’s sad – and not part of the American journalistic tradition I know.

Update: Wednesday’s New York Times story on this quotes Harold Jackson confirming that Yoo’s hiring was indeed an attempt to address the liberal bias perception: “‘There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,’ Mr. Jackson said. ‘We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.’”

But on Jan. 20, for all intents and purposes President Obama became the news cycle. His ambitions for toning down Washington’s nasty partisan warfare – and with that, creating better prospects for his agenda – depend on his ability to nudge the news cycle away from the cable network- and Drudge-driven obsession with transient panics and cultural outrages. (An obsession that the Bush administration, with its focus on divisive electoral politics, actively cultivated.) On that front, he’s been only partially successful so far. But far more so than most of us would have thought going in.

The media love nothing more than scandal, failure and disaster. But so far Obama has declined to provide them. The White House’s frenzy of activity during the first 100 days – much of it politically and substantively successful, with the opposition in disarray – more or less requires that news about him focus on relaying facts. It’s hard to stick with “who’s up, who’s down” when there’s only one player on the field.

And as Dan Kennedy notes, Obama has been a boon to the media business. It’s more fun and better for ratings to cover a glamorous new president than an unpopular old one. The camera loves Obama, his family, even his dog. His professorial cool is a stark contrast to the at-sea press conference performances of his predecessor. We’re also facing various alarming crises, so for various reasons – information, reassurance – people want to hear what Obama has to say: his prime time press conferences draw an impressive number of viewers. Robert Gibbs’s White House press office, meanwhile, has been strategically smart. It has sat Obama down with conservative and liberal columnists and bloggers, and had the president give non-traditional media (including the Huffington Post) a turn at press conferences. Not surprisingly, these are explicit choices to bypass the insular White House press corps in the shaping of public opinion.

Obama has lagged on the transparency front — the creation of a friendly interface that will allow journalists, bloggers – and everyone else – full access to information and data from the White House and rest of the government.. But the technical obstacles are formidable, so this will take time.

Where is all this going? We probably won’t know until Obama makes his first big stumble and has to fend off the wolves. But a Lewinksy or Rovian gambit seems unlikely from this White House, so that’s progress in itself.

Printing press ca. 1811

Human beings are afflicted with a certain bias about the world: we don’t expect it to change, at least not radically. When things are going well, this bias is amplified. Blessed with prosperity and stability in America over the past couple of generations, we’ve trained ourselves to expect a certain level of technological progress. We expect that living standards will gradually rise over time. We don’t expect revolutions. (And even when they occur in the political world, things often settle back down to a semblance of how they were before. Meet the new boss, et al.)

But complete revolutionary transformations do occur with some regularity in history. And when they do, we’re gobsmacked.

Old structures – the way people organize their lives – are swept away. Something very different emerges and consolidates over decades or centuries. Think: the invention of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution. The printing press. It’s this final example that Clay Shirky focuses on in this cogent essay. The invention of the printing press and the emergence of printed books altered reading habits, literacy, politics, religion, the whole shape of society. They were used to things being one way. That way was dissolving around them. The “new way” had not yet taken shape. So people couldn’t really comprehend what was going on:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Indeed, “what’s the new business model for news?” is almost always a conversation stopper, not a starter. It’s usually meant as a bitter rejoinder from old-school journalists to innovators and dreamers touting unproven, and probably not profitable, news technologies. But let’s face it: “unproven and probably not profitable” is far better than “disastrously unworkable,” which is the state of the newspaper model today. As Shirky notes, nobody knows what’s going to “work” ultimately. We are not going to “replace newspapers.” Instead, we’re going to keep doing journalism using the increasingly powerful, proliferating tools at our disposal and see what happens. That’s all we can do. And we live in a vital, freewheeling democracy. Something will happen.

I also like the ecosystem metaphor Steven Johnson employs in this SXSW speech (indeed, I’ve used something similar myself). Newspapers used to be culturally important because they filled an information void. Now that void has been filled to overflowing. It is true that traditional, dead-tree investigative and foreign reporting are both needed and uniquely difficult to replace. But nothing so far has stopped the relentless effusion of rich content in (as Johnson notes) technology and politics. That trend is likely to spread and unlikely to simply, or ever, stop.

So how does he work to change things? McQuaid warns that tightly controlling media access the way George Bush did isn’t the answer, and I agree. Instead, I’d say that he should send a consistent message about the value of serious journalism by providing the best access to the most serious journalists. Not the ones who are the most famous, or have the biggest audiences, or who agree with him the most often, but the ones who have written or aired the sharpest, liveliest, most substantive, most penetrating critiques of what he and his administration are doing. He should spar with them, he should engage with them, he should take their ideas seriously. Eventually, others will start to get the message: if you want to get presidential attention, you need to say something smart. It’s too late to for this to have any effect on media buffoons like Maureen Dowd or Chris Matthews, but you never know. It might encourage a few of the others to grow up. It’s worth a try, anyway.

I’d love to see Obama set up regular bull sessions with insightful journalists. It would offer a window on his thinking and also just be interesting and fun to watch. But since the problem exists in the broader media culture, not just Washington salons, this probably wouldn’t help all that much.

But two things offer hope on this front. First, the country faces grave crises, so serious news tends to crowd out trivial, character-driven stories. If Tim Geithner had been nominated during the Clinton administration, he likely would not have survived TurboTaxgate. (How many attorney general nominees did Clinton go through before settling on scandal-free Janet Reno?) But because we need competent, skilled leadership to forestall a second Great Depression, Geithner’s confirmation has never been in doubt. Of course, we have always needed competent, skilled leadership; too bad it takes terrible news to keep the psuedo-scandals at bay.

Second, Obama himself is good at breaking the rhythm of a feeding frenzy, either by starving it or by reframing the entire discussion. Last spring, for example, as damaging revelations about Rev. Jeremiah Wright poured forth, talking heads were urging Obama to publicly repudiate his former pastor — to take part in a crass, familiar ritual to appease and silence the media gods. He rejected that premise and instead gave his excellent speech on race, which both gobsmacked and impressed the establishment media.

The White House press corps is not going to stop asking gotcha questions. Talking heads are going to keep spouting speculative nonsense. But between the doom and gloom, major structural changes in government and a president who will occasionally talk substance, the media may be forced to set aside some of its trivial obsessions.

But it’s interesting that, at least on the surface, Obama’s approach to the establishment media – the TV and radio networks, wire services, newspapers and magazines that still cover the White House – doesn’t differ all that much from George W. Bush’s. As in, their correspondents are not getting much access. They are tightly managed. The White House press office doesn’t say very much, and what it says isn’t very revealing. What’s more, it’s signaling that past press rituals will not necessarily be observed. The Obama team declined to give the New York Times a pre-inauguration interview. Yesterday, the White House didn’t even let press photographers in to get some shots of Obama working in the Oval Office, provoking an AP announcement that it would not distribute what amounted to “visual press releases.”

Bush and Cheney viewed themselves in a manichean struggle with the forces arrayed against them, a list that includes not jihadists but the federal bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, reality itself! — and the media. As Jay Rosen has pointed out, they attempted to “de-certify” the media by strangling its access to information and using a variety of alternative, propagandistic avenues to get its message across. This proved disastrous.

Like Bush, Obama appears to view the media agenda in fundamental conflict with his own. But now, the perceived difference isn’t ideological. It’s programmatic. Obama (correctly, I think) sees the press representing two things that are clear obstacles to his ambitious plans: official Washington and a trivia-obsessed media culture.

First, the official Washington view: There’s a certain, Broderesque way of doing things. Be centrist, bipartisan – especially if you’re a Democratic president. Listen to the conservative talking heads who dominate Sunday talk shows, who will advise you to be … conservative. This world, shaped by the rise of conservative media since the Reagan era, remains several steps behind where the country is, or is ready to be, on politics and policy.

Second, the media culture: The cable maw must be fed with transient panics. Feeding frenzies and micro-scandals dominate. They fuel the chat shows, opinion columns and blogs. These faux crises and dramas, which usually pass with little consequence, can knock a presidential agenda off-stride or even destroy it.

These phenomena reflect the growing insularity of the establishment press over the past generation. They are obstacles both to good journalism and to the kind of bold political reforms Obama is pursuing.  He is right to be wary of them. But this doesn’t diminish the importance of openness. As a journalist and a citizen, I’d like to see more give-and-take between reporters and the president – and I expect we will see that. And I want insights on what’s happening in the West Wing and OEOB from experienced journalists. What we ultimately get depends not just on Obama’s willingness to engage, but on the media’s ability to break free of its own outmoded habits and prejudices.