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.

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 via CrunchBase

Every so often, the establishment press unintentionally reveals how it works. It’s as if you suddenly put Big Media through an fMRI that showed not only its internal structures and their connections to the government, business et al, but how this system actually works, dynamically – and also pinpoint where something has gone wrong.

I’m referring to James Risen’s New York Times story on Afghanistan’s apparently vast mineral resources. I wanted to wait a little while before writing on it, because such a story has a kind of lifecycle, and I wanted to see how this one played out.

At first it appeared to be a geopolitical game-changer, perhaps heralding the arrival of a the next big 21st conflict, like the “Great Game” in 19th century Central Asia between the Russian and British Empires. And maybe it is.

Then, instantly, the story came under fire for overhyping known facts and what looked like too-convenient timing. The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan – set to end next year – is faltering, Hamid Karzai is acting odder than usual, Congress is growing restive. Suddenly, the NYT runs a story quoting David Petraeus saying: Afghanistan has enormous strategic importance. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder read between the lines:

The way in which the story was presented — with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less — and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war. Indeed, as every reader of Jared Diamond’s popular works of geographic determinism knows well, a country rich in mineral resources will tend toward stability over time, assuming it has a strong, central, and stable government.

Risen’s story notes that the minerals discovery comes at a propitious time. He focuses on lithium, a critical component of electronics. One official tells him that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” — a comparison to oil. (I can see it now: “We must wean ourselves off our dependence on foreign lithium!”)

Then came the inevitable NYT pushback defending the story. Risen’s response was a mixture of befuddlement that anyone was questioning his reporting, and “do you know who I am” entitlement:

Risen didn’t take kindly to the blogospheric criticism. “Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas,” Risen said. [His original quote was edited to make it family-friendly.]

“The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people’s stories,” Risen told Yahoo! News during an increasingly hostile interview, which he called back to apologize for almost immediately after it ended. “Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don’t know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.” (Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.)

Finally, NYT bureau chief Dean Baquet (full disclosure: a friend from my early Times-Picayune days) gave a more considered defense to Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast, making his key point here:

“Jim had been working on a bunch of stuff, but some of it had been put in a little bit of limbo. Months ago, he told me he had gotten this tip about the extensive survey work in Afghanistan that had never been done before. So two weeks ago, I told him, why don’t you go back to the Afghanistan mining story and do that one? And that’s it. There was literally no leak.”

If there was no strategic leak – if nobody in CentCom, the Pentagon or the White House pushed the story on Risen, and this week’s timing was essentially random – then that torpedoes the “New York Times was played” angle.

But the story is still problematic for several reasons. As the New York Times itself has often noted, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, the appearance of a conflict can often be as bad as an actual conflict.

Moreover, there’s a problem in the basic structure of the article as a traditional straight news story. Its point of view is: Here’s the paper of record telling you something new, and that’s all you need to know. But it presents its facts stripped of context essential to understand what’s actually happening.

The fact that Petraeus is quoted is still a giveaway: this is a politically important story that Pentagon officials want played up. They want it in the mix of the current debate on the Hill, in the push-and-pull between the White House and Defense Department, and in the public’s mind. Risen’s story makes no mention of this political background or how untapped mineral resources might figure in the Afghanistan policy debate. Given that a New York Times story on it will automatically put the issue front and center, we were owed that context. Instead, the story takes place in a political vacuum.

And while the story takes pains to note the difficulty of getting $1 trillion in mineral resources out of the ground, that angle was still underplayed. Besides being politically frakked, Afghanistan has virtually no infrastructure. Who knows how many decades and untold billions would be required to even begin extracting gold and lithium on an economically meaningful scale? The $1 trillion figure will end up being a lot, lot less once you subtract the costs of extraction (and, let’s be honest, the impossible-to-quantify – lives of who knows how many Afghan miners, environmental damage, etc.). Perhaps this really is a story about nothing, at bottom a political feint. (Performing its own traditional role – spitting in the eye of the New York Times – the Washington Post ran an AP story saying, in essence, “you’ll never get that stuff out.”)

Finally, the story should have acknowledged earlier reporting by McClatchy and others, and the apparently widespread general knowledge of these mineral resources. Pentagon officials may not have fed Risen the story. But its appearance still owes much to the Pentagon’s recent maneuvering to exploit these resources, if not literally then politically.

Steel sheet pile pulled from the 17th Street Canal floodwall breach, New Orleans

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put a renewed media and political focus on the significant government failures of Hurricane Katrina, including the collapsed, flawed floodwalls and levees that put most of New Orleans underwater. There’s also an HBO drama now featuring John Goodman’s impassioned, expletive-laden speeches on that man-made disaster. The New York Times Public Editor recently devoted part of a column to discussing the subject.

But a selective amnesia still dominates for some reason. Take a look at this blogosphere exchange between NRO’s Yuval Levin and MoJo’s Kevin Drum:

Levin says, essentially, Katrina was an act of God for which no government could have been prepared, and, under the circumstances, things weren’t so bad:

I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.

It’s like Katrina in that many people’s attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them—and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.

I, and many others, have written on this many times before, but here goes. After Hurricane Betsy flooded parts of New Orleans in 1965, the federal government set out to build a hurricane levee system around the city, its suburbs, and other areas of south Louisiana. The message to inhabitants was: America has an obligation to protect vulnerable areas from catastrophic flooding; now you’ll be safe. But this system was poorly constructed, using out-of-date measurements and technology. And some of its levees and floodwalls were built with flawed designs: they could not do what they were specifically designed to do. During Katrina, those structures prematurely collapsed, opening gashes in the system that let Katrina’s storm surge inundate vast areas. The design flaws, the work of a private firm and approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were responsible for the vast majority of New Orleans flooding during the hurricane.

The notion that “these things happen” and there’s nothing we can do about it beforehand overlooks the history and the facts of the flood. Now, perhaps there is an NRO-friendly argument to be made that, given the scale of the challenge, we never should have undertaken to protect New Orleans from hurricane floods. I don’t agree, but such a point would at least indicate a basic familiarity with the subject matter. Instead, Levin simply treats the disaster as an abstract argument for the pointlessness of emergency preparedness, which is an odd argument indeed.

I expected better from Kevin Drum. But his response also ignores the levees-falling-down issue:

As Levin says, Katrina would have been an immense disaster no matter what. But it was far worse than it had to be because a conservative administration, one that fundamentally disdained the mechanics of government for ideological reasons, decided that FEMA wasn’t very important. Likewise, the BP blowout was made more likely because that same administration decided that government regulation of private industry wasn’t very important and turned the relevant agency into a joke. If you believe that government is the problem, not the solution, and if you actually run the country that way for eight years, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But we shouldn’t pretend it’s inevitable.

He’s right that the deliberate weakening of government institutions contributed mightily to both disasters. But it’s just wrong to say Katrina “would have been an immense disaster no matter what.” If some engineer, back in the 1990s, under time, budgetary, or political pressures, had not made the mathematical errors that later caused the walls to fall down, most of New Orleans would have been spared.

I realize levees are a lot less attention-grabbing than “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” – or the exotic mechanics of top kills and junk shots, for that matter. But this is an important issue, a significant failure of American knowhow and accountability that has never really been addressed by the government. That oversight will almost certainly lead to more disasters. It’s essential context for understanding Katrina, emergency management, and government dysfunction in general. Don’t leave it out, blogosphere.

Today, though, there’s a big problem: we can’t tell any longer where nature leaves off and civilization begins. And that’s confusing.

Start with global warming and work your way down. Mankind is now causing what used to be called “natural disasters.” The Gulf oil spill is not a natural disaster in the traditional sense: nature didn’t cause it. But it is a natural disaster in that it’s disastrous to nature.

Or take the oft-litigated (in the courts and the media) case of Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans levee system. I’ll repeat this here, for clarity: most of the devastating flooding of New Orleans occurred because faulty floodwalls collapsed because of errors in their designs approved by the Army Corps of Engineers – i.e., the U.S. government. Natural disaster? Not really, though obviously nature had a hand in it. John Goodman’s character Creighton Bernette articulates this eloquently in the first episode of Treme.

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Yet there is a widespread tendency to elide these distinctions, in the media and society. New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt took this up on Sunday, in response to a petition from Levees.org asking for an official NYT style change, to call the New Orleans flood a “man-made disaster.” (Ironically, the petition was sent in response to this article, which calls the oil spill a “natural disaster.”) Hoyt was sympathetic, but no style change is forthcoming:

However you want to define what happened in that city, the hurricane certainly was a natural disaster for residents further east, along the Mississippi coast.

But in other articles, The Times has said Katrina “devastated” New Orleans, and used other similar language. Philip Corbett, the standards editor, said, “We have repeatedly in our coverage over years dealt in great detail with all the factors that led to the catastrophe in New Orleans.” Readers, he said, “will understand you are talking about the whole event: the natural disaster that was the hurricane and the various problems, man-made, and the government response that exacerbated the problems.”

Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is, when “Katrina” becomes a journalistic shorthand for all those problems (institutional, political, social, environmental, on top of basic stuff like bad floodwalls) it’s easy to lose sight of what really happened. Journalists are nothing if not sloppy when it comes to complex problems, and in this case the underlying story is one of deep institutional dysfunction, an abandonment of basic government and societal accountability. That is, something that lies outside the comfort zone of many journalists, especially those covering day-to-day politics. The plain fact is that neither the government (for obvious reasons) nor the media (for less obvious ones) has ever embraced the “man-made disaster” idea, despite the evidence.

But the New York Times stylebook is not the best venue to have this fight. It would be a low-level bureaucratic fix to what is, in essence, a huge paradigm shift (and something that actually deserves the use of this over-used term). It’s now more important than ever to identify the human part of the equation in natural disasters – and to make an explicit point of identifying it.

When I was writing a Katrina book along with Mark Schleifstein (who is now reporting on the oil spill), I interviewed a computer scientist named Alan Wexelblat who dabbled in thinking about disasters. His message was, essentially, we don’t have a clue about the ways our technologies interact with nature. We don’t think strategically about that. And as those interactions and feedbacks grow more complex, this is going to lead to a lot more stuff blowing up, collapsing, and imploding.

The term “natural disaster” may not be obsolete – we’ve still got tsunamis and volcanic eruptions to deal with – its usefulness is in sharp decline. The number of catastrophes that it accurately describes is shrinking. But our collective thinking – amplified by the media – is to lump everything together in a way that tends to strip the human agency out of what’s really happening. This is quite useful for those who screwed up. But it’s very dangerous.

Image via Wikipedia

Maybe it’s ridiculous, even offensive to compare the actions of energy industry companies – whose screwups are having catastrophic impacts on the ocean environment, the economy, the people of the Gulf of Mexico – with Facebook’s relentless quest to open up, and squeeze more revenue from, your personal information. One is “real,” the other virtual, even trivial. But on some level, they’re exactly the same problem.

Image via Wikipedia

Both Facebook and BP are operating in Wild West-type environments with minimal oversight, doing things that society considers of paramount importance – at least as measured by the demand for their products and services. BP is seeking a scarce and extremely important substance in a remote, unforgiving environment. Facebook has seemingly converted half the world to social networking – it’s shaping and defining that essential 21st century experience. (One important distinction is that the oil companies were after something that will be gone soon, and Facebook has tapped something that will only grow.)

But now the power these entities wield seems like dangerous overreaching into the unknown, where things can blow up in our faces. And that’s the kind of moxie that built America! (Seriously, it is.) But that’s exactly the problem. Because there is no Wild West anymore.

One consequence of living in a technological age is that everything is connected to everything else in surprising ways. So the risks that BP took on in drilling the OCS weren’t merely the downside of not finding oil, but of a major industrial accident and a far-reaching environmental catastrophe that affects us all on some level. Facebook networks us all together, but at the price of putting those relationships and personal information in a commercial domain. Like an oil company, its ultimate purpose is to exploit, and the true costs of that exploitation won’t be clear until something goes wrong. Which it will, if it hasn’t already.

The other 21st-century wrinkle: technological systems are often too complex, their functioning not fully understood even by the people who build and run them. In the case of oil, it’s a drilling rig measuring nearly five miles from top to bottom, reaching into crushing, cold depths where bizarre chemical reactions are the norm. The equipment is just part of a complex hierarchical system – with responsibility dispersed between different locations and companies. Facebook is constantly growing and changing. And you, of course, don’t know how your privacy settings are supposed to work. Neither does Facebook – and they like it that way!

The thing is, we don’t know where all this is going. The federal government cannot be relied upon to oversee any of this. Its reach is too short, its capabilities diminished by long stretches of anti-government stewardship and outpaced by the challenges it faces. Oil drilling is geographically remote and done by international corporations with powerful lobbying arms. Social networking is, for government agencies, a new frontier and one that doesn’t seem, on the face of it, like a good target for traditional forms of consumer regulation.

So when companies are called to account, we get a lot of BS and plain old confusion. Such as this week’s hearings:

BP blamed the failure of Transocean’s blowout preventer and raised a new question about whether Transocean disregarded “anomalous pressure test readings” just hours before the explosion. Transocean blamed decisions made by BP and cited possible flaws in the cementing job done by Halliburton. And Halliburton said that it had faithfully followed BP’s instructions and that Transocean had started replacing a heavy drilling mud with seawater before the well was sealed with a cement plug.

Facebook is similarly averse to explaining what its stewardship responsibilities are for the vast database of personal information it has acquired. Take, for example, the infuriating, condescending approach taken by Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for public policy in this New York Times exchange with readers:

It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making. Even worse, our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users. That’s not acceptable or sustainable. But it’s certainly fixable. You’re pointing out things we need to fix.

We’ve worked hard to educate our users about changes to, and innovations in, our products. Facebook users receive notices about our new products and whenever we propose a change to any policies governing the site, we have notified users and solicited feedback.

Clearly, this is not enough. We will soon ramp up our efforts to provide better guidance to those confused about how to control sharing and maintain privacy.

Facebook, taking heat for its privacy policies and this misleading PR strategy, has called an “all hands meeting” for Thursday. Let’s hope it’s not the last one before the whole Facebook structure blows up in our faces.

It apparently started in February when Dana Milbank penned a Rahm-boosting column.  Then over the past week we got another pro-Rahm piece from the Washington Post, which self-consciously regurgitated the opinions of Emanuel defenders into an “emerging narrative” that we shouldn’t blame him for the White House’s political problems. And in recent days we got longer, more ambitious profiles from Noam Scheiber of The New Republic and Peter Baker of The New York Times. (If there are others, I don’t want to hear about them.)

Having read all of this, here’s the takeaway: Rahm Emanuel is loyal to Obama and a team player. He takes direction from the president and doesn’t freelance. He sometimes argues for more “pragmatic” positioning on issues, going for incremental wins at the expense of the dicier long ball. Sometimes Obama follows this advice, sometimes he doesn’t. (And on health care reform, Obama appears to have done both.) He swears a lot. He is all business. He is also 50 years old. And thin.

“At 50, Emanuel has the lean, taut look of a lifelong swimmer, with broad shoulders and distractingly prominent quadriceps.” – Scheiber

“At 50, he has the coiled energy of aides half his age, still as wiry thin as he was during his improbable days as a ballet dancer.” – Baker

Why is all of this so formulaic and un-illuminating? When I read, say, a New York Times Magazine piece, I expect to be surprised and provoked, not anesthetized. The inner workings of any White House offer dramatic material, personal conflicts, history in the making. Past chiefs of staff – John Sununu and Don Regan come to mind – stirred up some great controversies. That haughty pair were excellent villains inside the West Wing and in the media, and their hubris eventually got them canned.

I don’t think this is the fault of the journalists. The material they’re working with just isn’t that great. Emanuel is certainly obnoxious, mean, relentless and personally ambitious. But he doesn’t seem especially hubristic. It’s more the methodology. There is an expectation that personalities can explain politics and policies. And that’s okay as far as it goes. When you’re talking the president and his top aide, personalities and proclivities toward pragmatism or boldness matter.

During the Clinton presidency there was so much improvisation and political tacking that those factors were very important. Heck, the Clinton presidency ultimately became all about the First Couple’s respective personalities and bizarre doings inside the West Wing.

But circumstances changed during the Bush presidency. The ingrained media focus on personalities and individual action (Bush the guy folks wanted to have a beer with, Rove the evil genius, etc.) mostly missed what was really going on – the systematic politicization of previously-insulated customs and institutions (war and the Justice Department, for example) at the expense of basic competence.

Now, the political system has become progressively more dysfunctional and the economy is in terrible shape. Those two factors are of overriding importance in shaping a presidency trying to both unwind Bush’s mistakes and embark on an ambitious domestic policy agenda. So if you’re looking for where Obama has gone wrong (if, in fact, his presidency is going down the tubes – an assumption that is driving a lot of these stories, that I don’t find convincing), you need to start with the fundamentals and ask, could any president so easily overcome the combination of GOP intransigence and 10 percent unemployment (and a trivia-obsessed news cycle) and the great popular discontent that goes along with those things? Perhaps the presidency itself just isn’t a strong enough institution to, as the media expects it, be the ultimate master and arbiter of national politics.

Everybody has an opinion on this. Certainly, Obama is attempting to be a centrist president during a time when no political center exists in American politics. But Rahm Emanuel is at best a bit player in that drama. Lord knows, if Jane Hamsher were chief of staff, maybe things would be different. But Rahm’s distracting quadriceps don’t have much to do with any of it.

It was an indelible Obamamoment. Maybe even an Obamamiracle.

The president was sandwiched between Hillary and Michelle, like turkey on white and pumpernickel with a dollop of dijon, for a photo op with Hamid Karzai. It’s the kind of situation that gets all up in his grill, two strong women in a pincer movement.

This is one reason why, although he’s ballooned the deficit up to an astonishing $1.4 trillion, the perpetually svelte and self-denying Dieter-in-Chief favors egg white omelets and Tofurkey over real food: he’s so skeletal he can easily slip out of a tight spot.

Sure enough, when those quickly converging upper arms – one bare and brawny, one in pantsuit armor – brushed his, Obama turned sideways and disappeared.

Our president may be a wispy, nicotine-addicted Vulcan short an emotion chip. But he’s mastered the technique of giving his enemies the slip, apparating out of there like Harry Potter in a tight spot with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Bill Clinton went all the way to hell and back; W never knew he was in hell; he thought it was just Crawford in August; our Barack, Arabic for “blessed,” somehow skirts the Purgatory of the skirts.

Little Lord Fauntledubya and his regents Rummy and Cheney imagined themselves kings of the world, threw our most fundamental values over the prow of the ship of state and planted a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the iceberg it struck – all of it with less thought than Samantha Jones gives to a mid-seduction powder-room touchup.

But Obama promised us the utopias of Philip K. Dick and Aldous Huxley and all we got was James Cameron: Osama avatars prancing through security in PETN-enhanced underpants.

It’s sad. All the twentysomething neophyte acolytes on the White House staff know how to post status updates to their Twitter accounts and sext their way through the Washington’s hookup hangouts and the most pious of C Street swinger’s dens. But they aren’t so adept at sending their poorer, less-educated contemporaries to die chasing Osama up Waziristan’s wazoo.

Tasked with cleaning up this ginormous mess, Barack, Rahm and Ax are swooning over the burdens of Yemen, Afghanistan and Gitmo like tween girls with a case of the vapors from one too many viewings of “New Moon.” America is Twilight’s Bella, divided eternally between soulful, self-denying Team Barack and meat-eating Team Cheney.

Dick Cheney is Darth Vader; it’s Barack who will need a defribrillator. And is kind of like Bill Hader.

Which brings me back to the other day, when my friend Leon Wieseltier and I were taking in the National Geographic Society’s Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit, where the statues are crumbling like Tiger Woods’ endorsement deals, yet remain standing after 4,000 years. That’s Tang Dynasty old school – and totally alien to Washington, where warriors are disposable and nobody stands up for a lady on the Metro anymore, and the Metro itself is more crash-prone than Lindsay Lohan.

“Is non-eschatological sculpture possible?” Leon asked, beginning a 23-minute monologue. “It’s kismet, Maureen, that your knack for the aperçu now seems to put the burden of proof squarely on the enemies of the eschaton. So it is with Obama, who may grasp the symbolic uses of the martial and the banalities of diplomacy, but to whom the lessons of history remain a Rubik’s cube of human destiny which he would never even seek to solve, and so must put on the shelf in a permanently semi-scrambled state abutting the ponderous unread volume of everything he does not know, not because he has not read it but because he will not know it. It takes an old soul like Judah Halevi – whom I was rereading again (a rare and delicate edition of The Kuzari on loan from Yale, discovered in the ruins of a Provence synagogue many years ago by a friend), as I tend to on cold midwinter nights next to glowing embers, a tumbler of Mortlach 1938 and a frayed yet vividly-dyed Afghan cozied around my stooped yet lithe frame, when the reality of evil in the world seems more implacable still than in the daylight and the will of the political system to confront it veers to comedy, the noisy slaps of a Three Stooges routine which being mere sound effects never truly bruised Larry, Curly or Shemp – to capture Obama’s predicament in the world: the archly cool politesse of his dealings with Ahmadinejad and Hamas can only make us verklempt.”

I was instantly transported. My patent leather shoes were clicking along the hallway tiles of my junior high in Northeast Washington, D.C., when I saw him for the first time.

He was leaning, the way bad boys do, against the radiator – which was turned off, because the nuns kept the school colder than Letterman’s studio. (“Steam heat is the Devil’s breath,” my fifth-grade teacher Sister Rictrudis told me, menacingly flicking her ruler against her scapular, when I worked up the courage to ask about it.)

I sauntered by the radiator the next day at the same time, just after third period. My heart thrummed, my face flush with the ripeness of young womanhood. But he had been expelled. I never saw him again. (I heard he later joined the Irish mafia and disappeared running guns to Belfast.)

Turned out he was caught sneaking smokes just like our president does – giving the Rose Garden the musky air of a 1960s-era Catholic school boys room. And still, Michelle and Hillary let him get away with that too.

Briefly: the NYT’s David Carr wrote a piece calling attention to what a lot of us have noticed in recent months: that under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership, the Journal’s Washington coverage has moved noticeably rightward from its traditional, ideologically neutral stance. Probably the low point of this was the news story that repeatedly used the term “death tax” for “inheritance tax.”

The WSJ’s managing editor Robert Thomson responded with (politely-phrased!) trash talk:

The news column by a Mr David Carr today is yet more evidence thatThe New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat. The usual practice of quoting ex-employees was supplemented by a succession of anonymous quotes and unsubstantiated assertions. The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.

NYT editor Bill Keller then responded to this, and no doubt Thomson will fire back, if not now at some other propitious time. And so on.

Here’s the problem. There are a lot of flaws in standard DC political coverage – its obsession with the news cycle and cable talking heads, its deference to power, its maddening insider’s cynicism and arrogance. But American politics still depends on journalism institutions to, well, explain it to itself. The federal government is a huge and complex monster. If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with it and expose what’s going on, it helps to have a weighty name behind you – like the NYT or WSJ, with their traditions, smart editors and clout.

But those institutions are under siege and disappearing. Layoffs have all but demolished many important redoubts of mainstream media’s political coverage. Only the New York Times, McClatchy (home to fine, often prescient coverage that is often underplayed by the mediasphere), and the Wall Street Journal at or not too far below their traditional full strength in staff and clout.

Except, er, that now the WSJ Washington bureau is apparently caught in the tractor beam of Murdoch’s Death Star. I feel for the journalists there, because this “death tax” business and increasingly blatant bias will hurt their credibility in DC and in journalism. The WSJ’s rightward lurch will also hurt the public debate, because it will have lost an important honest broker. There will be a lot of heat, not much light. It will be that much harder to tell what is really going on. And that’s just the type of environment in which Thompson and Murdoch thrive.

In this case one big-time paper, the Post, sticks with “critics contend,” while the other presents a contrast between “decades of peer-reviewed science” and politically-motivated opposition. Moreover, the NYT presents the controversy as something that might get in the way of deliberations in Copenhagen; while the Post presents it as a scandal in which “wonky” emails may not constitute “proof” that climate change is a “lie or a swindle” but still justify introducing “lie” and “swindle” as possibilities.

Not to overdramatize, but: in a way the papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another “-Gate” style flap where it’s hard to get to the bottom of the story.

I think Fallows is a little unfair to the Washington Post reporters (one of whom, Juliet Eilperin, is a friend). The climate emails do “raise hard questions,” as the story says, about how some climate scientists have been operating, and they have set off a significant political fight. There’s nothing wrong with focusing a story on this. The problem is context. To cover the politics, first you must take pains to establish the scientific – and political – context, otherwise readers will never get the bottom line on what it all means. That is: The fundamentals here are not in serious dispute, though there are unresolved issues and thus fierce intra-academy disputes. The Post goes through the motions on this, quoting scientists on the consensus, but still seems curiously agnostic about what to make of the whole thing. We don’t get a sense of how serious the issues really are. (As a former newspaper reporter, I’ll tell you where I think the problem lies: the piece needed more/better editing, and didn’t get it.)