If you enjoy media-centric navel-gazing as much as I do (that is not snark), you’ll want to read Michael Wolff’s piece on the Politico. I think he mostly gets Politico right: it’s disgustingly inside-the-beltway stuff that is somewhat redeemed by the sheer mania of some of its blogger/reporters (like Ben Smith). There’s one thing I don’t quite agree with, though:
If one of the gravest dangers of politics, and the real rap against the Beltway, is its insiderism, Politico vastly compounds the problem. The propensity of the political class to speak only to itself is enabled to a new degree by Politico. Indeed, the ever more detailed nature of this conversation may mean there’s no time to speak to anyone else. What’s more, since these are the only people who matter—Politico’s 6.7 million monthly visitors include almost all the people who shape the agenda, and a disproportionate number of people who pay for the shaping of the agenda—why bother speaking to everyone else?
Also, you become less and less able. The granular and focused and O.C.D. nature of Politico’s view of the world changes the language. Laymen can’t enter this conversation, and the people who are involved in it can’t leave it—can’t set aside so easily the shorthand of legislative, policy, and media talk or the thousand names of minor characters who become major for a 20-minute news cycle, or recalibrate the relative importance of Washington sound and fury against what most other people are thinking about.
While I agree with this critique of insiderism, it seems silly to discuss the issue without mentioning “The Note”, which began years before the Politico and helped shape the asinine political atmosphere of the 90s and early 2000s. Halperin wrote “The Note” in such a way that only real insiders could understand it; with a little time and a few google searches, you can understand most of what you read in the Politico.
There are all kinds of problems with the Politico, the blatant whoring for Drudge links, the tendency of the second string reporters there to simply reprint GOP press releases, and so on. But it’s helped democratize political navel-gazing. And, since DC’s interest in its own navel has always been its raison d’etre (long before the Politico, probably long before “The Note”), letting more people in on the view is probably a good thing.
Ruth
Mainly, I hate seeing ‘Politico’ presented on CSpan as if it is internet blogging, instead of the winger political advertising that it really allows itself to be.
Zifnab
I can’t help think that using jargon and insider-Washington players should be the last thing people would complaining about. It’s like picking up the Economist or the New England Journal of Medicine and saying, “Oh well this is all very informative, but I wish they could reprint it on the junior high school level so more people could understand it.”
NO! We’ve had magazines like USA Today and Newsweek dumbing down politics to the lowest common denominator for years now. Boiling the entire Clinton era down to Penus! Penus! Penus! did not improve the insider-outsider relations in Washington. Turning every policy debate into a he-said she-said with absolutely no depth or nuance hasn’t benefited the global warming debate or the abortion debate or the tax policy debate at all. You just end up with bumber-sticker slogans and, “Well Ronald Reagen/Bill Clinton would have…” asinine conjecture.
As for Politico’s one-sidedness, it has an active forum community that regularly calls bullshit. Hearing “Weekly political magazine has right-wing bias” just doesn’t phase me anymore. I’m not even sure if that’s a solid strike against them when the entire establishment media/political center went right wing decades ago.
The Grand Panjandrum
Maybe we should replay this Walter Cronkite piece until just one of these Villagers gets it. Just one.
Got it from a Glenn Greenwald tweet this morning. How appropriate, no? Ethics, insiderism, cliques, etc … I often get the sense (rightly, or wrongly) that a lot of these guys ended up being stuffed in their lockers, or had their lunch money snatched by some bully, and now they have the chance to be the cool kids.
amk
Money quote
They derided the model and grew exactly into that model. Thank God, I seldom go there.
passerby
Insiderism? Check out this Glen Greenwald interview with Chuck Todd from Thursday. GG is disputing CT’s defense-of-torture position that he spewed on Morning Ho.
(transpcript)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/07/16/todd/index1.html
CTs responses read like word salad because his position against investigations for war crimes (torture) is weak tea.
But I think this is a classic example of insiderism. Is Todd being honest with himself? or is he willfully obtuse on the matter because he doesn’t want to lose his million dollar job?
General Winfield Stuck
Thank Gawd! Our long national nightmare is over. Teh Freedom Navel Gazing is on the march, where all navels are equal, though some are more equal than others.
plasticgoat
Talk about a website that is trying so hard to assure it’s own obsolescence, and you must be talking Politico. This past week has given us the much desired and needed articles on what the Obama’s drank and where, what the President’s blue jeans looked like, and the right of American citizens to bear nunchucks. Blockbuster stories all, and so much more important than warrantless wiretapping, torture, the escalation in Afghanistan, and health care reform.
media browski
It’s a huge improvement for us in the Beltway over the Washington Post. (Let’s not even consider the Washington Times.) Is this “damning with faint praise?”
Anyway, I find it much more useful, but then I’ve never suffered from this need to “decipher” the Note or Politico, so maybe I’m a “real insider.”
geg6
Are you spoofing us, Doug? Democratizing insiderism is a good thing? Seriously? Average Americans speaking in meaningless tropes, horse race analysis, blatant sucking up to dishonest and selfish pols and pundits, and all-out defense of the status quo of the monied elite are good things for average Americans to absorb and want to emulate as they seem to want to do with every popular media phenomenon? Really?
Zifnab
@geg6: When you’ve got a debate in Washington over health insurance mandates which revolves around Mark Pryor from Arkansas pushing the Walmart agenda against Carl Levin from Michigan working in the interests of the automotive industry you want to know more than just “The Senate is debating health insurance”. If that means you get an all-out defense of the status quo coming from Mitch McConnell and another “Democrats Divided!” story on the front page, at least you actually get to hear major players and what they’re arguing about.
Open up a copy of Time and you’ll get the same right wing slant with fewer actual details, probably summed up in a three sentence blurb right after the table of contents.
Lola
I think Ben Smith is just as big of a hack as the rest of them. Is he really liberal? Doesn’t seem like it to me. His analysis is as superficial as it gets.
DougJ
Yes. DC has always been self-obsessed. The Politico is a window on that. Maybe that makes the self-obsession more glamorous but it also makes it more visible to the public at large. I think the Politico does lay bare the foibles of DC (sometimes inadvertently) better than its competition.
DougJ
When you’ve got a debate in Washington over health insurance mandates which revolves around Mark Pryor from Arkansas pushing the Walmart agenda against Carl Levin from Michigan working in the interests of the automotive industry you want to know more than just “The Senate is debating health insurance”. If that means you get an all-out defense of the status quo coming from Mitch McConnell and another “Democrats Divided!” story on the front page, at least you actually get to hear major players and what they’re arguing about.
Exactly.
Derelict
Yeah, it’s great that the navel gazing is now more accessible. However, I think al it does is encourage a kind of narcissistic vacuousness in the media. And that’s something we already have WAAAYYY too much of.
General Winfield Stuck
Politico — our through the looking glass rag.
DougJ
However, I think al it does is encourage a kind of narcissistic vacuousness in the media. And that’s something we already have WAAAYYY too much of.
My feeling is that they’ve already maxed out on that and it can’t get worse.
MikeJ
If you ever want to be really depressed read thecapitolist and find out how many ways the best and the brightest working on the hill can call each other “fag”.
inkadu
One Bill Moyers documentary on the information leading to the Iraq war made a very good point. The closed-loop of government-and-journalism was already complete before the Iraq War Reloaded. A few major newspapers, “the important ones,” (New York Times, Washington Post, etc) had a lot of access to the government, but were also the ONLY ones read by the people in Washington. So the government would give a slant to the media, the media would repeat it back to Washington, and the insiders would filter it back up to the media–a closed loop. In other words, Washington was eating its own shit.
Meanwhile there was independent reporting done from some newspapers that pointed to the flimsiness of the Administration’s case, but they weren’t in any of the “important papers.”
The Washington feedback loop extends all over the country and infiltrates the very organs that are supposed to be the watchdogs of democracy.
Third Eye Open
Slightly OT, Speaking of navel gazing, I am having a hell of a chuckle over EEs principles and his conflicted feelings over the whole Keene issue. I love how he describes his influence and stature in the Republican/conservative(?) movement
Can anyone actually quantify how much “market-share” RS holds? Are these the new untainted luminaries of the Right? Gods Help Us
Doctor Science
passerby:
I’m glad I’m not the only one who couldn’t parse Chuck Todd’s half of the conversation with Glenzilla. Is this a function of reading the transcript instead of listening? IMHO Glenn does a much better job of speaking in actual sentences that convey coherent ideas from one end of the sentence to the other. But maybe that works better in text than on the air.
Seriously, none of what CT said made *sense* to me, in the most basic grammatical ways: I could not figure out what he was trying to say.
media browski
@Doctor Science: Well, much of what was wrong with CT’s argument is that he’s got the facts wrong, but he understands the political premise of delaying prosecutions: get the rest of the agenda through before you plunge DC into 100 days of night.
passerby
@Doctor Science:
“…in the most basic grammatical ways: I could not figure out what he was trying to say.”
I think Todd found that in order to defend his position, he would actually have to shrug off the concept of the Rule of Law which is equal to being a Constitutional heretic. Not easy for anyone to do much less someone not skilled in debate. That would explain the babbling.
Todd’s view is based on politics while Greenwald was raising the legal question. And, in order to defend his view, Todd was forced into the position of accusing Greenwald of being “too black and white”.
It reminds me of a recent, similar exchange here on BJuice between TimF and kay about how to proceed with investigating war crimes. There is a political aspect and there is a legal aspect. These elements were badly blurred (intentionally) by 8 years of Dick and W. No wonder there is confusion.
shelley matheis
But now for some really important news. From HuffPost,
“Oscar Meyer Wienermobile Crashes Into Wisconsin Home!”
passerby
@shelley matheis:
Hahahaha. I clicked on that story for its entertainment value. Fortunately, not too much damage. Unfortunately, the driver was a woman which opens up the issue to 40-kinds of colorful jokes. Not the least of which is:
“Wimin drivers can’t handle the Weinermobile.”
Nethead Jay
@shelley matheis: Yeah, but I really don’t mind the entertainment aspects of the HuffPost, as long as it doesn’t take away too much from more important stuff. There should be room for that and sometimes I like browsing lighter fare when politics gets too enraging. And being all-round hopefully helps pay the bills.
Political Pragmatist
Chuck Todd was on Hardball and said he didn’t know why Repubs were attacking Barney Frank since no one outside the Beltway knows who Barney is. Instant cred loss. CT doesn’t know the Con Playbook? Out of touch and not in sight of it.
I pretty much saw him from that moment on as a navel gazer. Is there any doubt that Russert would have gotten the reference?
Batocchio
Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs has a really good chapter dedicated to The Note.
Napoleon
I am convinced that the inside the beltway echo chamber is the biggest single danger to our country and that virtually every other problem we face arises out of it. As the Presidential campaign went along I began to see Obama being outside of it as his greatest strength.
Woodrowfan
And the comments on Politico almost make the comments on Youtube seem intelligent…