Monthly Archives: June 2006

Want to know why political journalism is such a mess? A piece of it is that they don't do their homework. (Another piece is that they used to be the intellectuals of the working class; now they are professionals who went to college with the people they cover.) It's gotten to the point that it's news when a political reporter actually reads to the end of reports, as can be seen in this profile of (obsessively) hard-working NYT reporter Sewell Chan:

NYO – Off the Record: “The story I like to tell about Sewell is you hand him the M.T.A. budget, and two days later he’s digging through it and he’s finding B1 story leads on page 250,” Mr. Jamieson said. “I think he’s home in bed reading it. He flips through it and finds things like they’re going to take conductors off train lines this year. It’s just classic good reporting.”

This is unusual? Ouch. No wonder Murray Waas is such a standout.

I think the problem is particularly acute among reporters who cover “politics” which they see as somehow divorced from underlying realities of governing. The reporters with more specialized beats are sometime impressively well informed. Certainly quite a few of the Washington Post and NYT tech journalists I've spoken to had done real homework, as had the main AP guys. But, in my admittedly limited experience, pound for pound the real standouts in terms of preparation are the Wall Street Journal reporters. Either they routinely read in depth or I'm just the last guy they call when no one else is around.

Brad DeLong explains how to maximize your chances of getting accurate information if you are among what Jay Rosen calls The People Formerly Known as the Audience and are restricted to the traditional media. Brad’s focus is on economic reporting where the problem is especially large, but I think it’s more widespread than just economics:

If you want to understand Washington DC, the American government, and American economic policy, then: trust the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, trust the Financial Times, trust the political and lobbying coverage of the National Journal. Trust Bloomberg and Knight-Ridder to try as best they can to get the story straight under immense time pressure. Trust nothing else until it is verified. Use yesterday’s *Post* for fishwrap. Use today’s *Post* to line the kitchen floor while you continue to housetrain the new puppy.

Why is the Washington Post so bad? Because too many of the big hitters at the Post (on the National desk as opposed to, say, Metro) are not actually particularly interested in policy reality but rather are focused on its first derivative, which is politics, and its second derivative, which is inside-the-Beltway chatter about the future of politics,

The problem is not that the Washington Post hires people who are unintelligent or lazy while the Wall Street Journal hires whip-smart workaholics. The problem is that conveying accurate information about the economy is high up on almost all the *Journal’s* news reporters’ and way down on almost all the Post reporters’ list of priorities.

Making a splash–yes. … Saying who is one-up politically inside-the-beltway today–yes. Pleasing your editors so they’ll give your stories better placement–yes. Pleasing your sources–like Denny Hastert–so they’ll keep talking to you first–yes. Informing the public about the functioning of the economy and about the dilemmas of economic policy–what’s that?All of this seems very sad and largely true, although there still are some terrific reporters on the print Post who are still doing great traditional reporting (e.g. Pincus), not to mention several folks at the online washingtonpost.com. But it’s striking how often the Post’s editors bury some of their work deep inside the A section…

Reading Brad’s media guide, though, I was struck by how it felt like half of a Europe joke.

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