July 18th, 2009 at 11:49 pm

On Politico

You should read Michael Wolff’s article about Politico, an eloqent and lyrical look at how Politico’s monomaniacal insider journalism has taken over D.C. reporting.

Excepting Wolff’s hilarious belief that coming from Rochester, N.Y. (population 207,000) or Orange County (population 3,010,000) makes one a “small-town boy,” it’s a valuable argument. Politico has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest ambitions at its project of centralizing and spewing out every developing event/idea in national politics, but in doing so it has changed the pace and orientation of political journalism in an extremely problematic way. From Wolff’s conclusion:

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.

Politico reduces the world to Rahm Emanuel and to the people who want to be Rahm Emanuel.

And yet, this is a passionate conversation among quick and deeply knowledgeable folk. The habit and, perhaps, necessity of traditional news organizations to reduce and simplify and attenuate and, in the process, make news flaccid and often wrong have been superseded by these over-informed motormouths. It’s the raw stuff, before the family paper or knuckleheaded network news has watered it down.

Now, he shies away from making a judgment as to whether this efficient but exclusive journalism is ultimately a good thing or not. You’re welcome to draw your own conclusions.

For my money, though, Politico journalism isn’t good or bad so much as it’s irrelevant. Yes, everyone in Washington reads Mike Allen’s Playbook every morning to learn who wrote what in the Wall Street Journal and whose birthday it is. Who cares? This stuff is nothing more than reflective. Politico’s not interested in driving Washington politics, only chronicling it. Wolff describes Politico as using information as its currency, rather than money; but its emphasis on information also works to the exclusion of influence and power.

The incentive structure in political decision-making is accountable, after all, mostly to non-D.C. people who don’t read Politico — local donors, business, constituency groups, and on rare occasions voters — or to the very influential D.C. people who don’t have to read Politico, because they know all the important parts anyway. All Politico does is transmit information about this process to the rest of Washington, the countless people whose livelihoods depend on being on the right side of political decisions. They, and their trade paper, just aren’t relevant to real politics.

I remember in the early days of Politico, when the left-wing blogs called it “Drudgico” and shunned linking to it. This was and is a justified slur: Politico and Drudge both employ a particular sort of shallow, putatively conservative senationalism that happens to be a winning combination for Internet traffic avalanches. But that kind of mindless booga-booga right-wing arm-waving is Drudge’s raison d’etre; for Politico it’s just one of many arrows in their utterly nonideological quiver. Politico has no agenda. It became clear pretty quickly, once Politico took off, that these guys were just throwing everything against the wall and hoping some of it stuck — a process that, every now and then, produces real journalism entirely by coincidence. At this point I don’t think anyone is carrying on the Politico boycott, although we regularly grumble about how infuriatingly insider-y they are as we link to their latest scoop.

And accidental journalism really isn’t enough. Without an agenda, even a self-serving one, or a desire to reach the people outside the Beltway whose opinions might actually be swayed by political reporting, Politico categorically cannot amount to anything of political substance. Which is why it’s so easy to ignore — I’m a voracious political news junkie and I don’t bother to read Politico, because the one valuable thing they print any given day will get linked by at least six full-time bloggers with actual political viewpoints, and then I’ll move on and do other valuable things with my limited time instead of reading about Michelle Obama’s wardrobe and sifting through the fricking Playbook.

It really is a lot like The Note, which DougJ of Balloon Juice was right to mention in the post that led me to Wolff’s article. The Note was a daily compendium of political news which Mark Halperin wrote for a long time (it still exists for some reason, now written in a disorientingly calm and measured voice and read by no one). Halperin’s Note was like Politico put through a vaporizer — pure, unadulterated Washington bullshit, full of nonsense about “winning the day” and “Mommy Party and Daddy Party” and whatever other meaningless jargon Halperin could think of to foist on his beleaguered interns. I read the Note religiously in the runup to the 2004 campaign, back when I was a nerdy junior in a rural Canadian high school, because it made me feel like I was part of a connected political community. Then I discovered porn and Daily Kos, so my need for The Note waned; after I stopped reading it I realized how little value there was to all that endless information I had internalized. It just had no consequences.

So that’s why I don’t get exercised over Politico and the future of political journalism. There is much more to politics, and at the same time much less, than a glorified trade paper could ever hope to cover. Real political journalism — motivated, investigative, engaging, specific — will always exist somewhere, even if the failure of newspapers leaves it mostly to TV and bloggers. I’d rather listen to a blogger with a passionate interest in a particular topic, or watch a TV reporter shape a story to maximize the interest of her millions of viewers (an important political/cultural transaction in its own right), than visit a website that bleats out the same stream of political white noise twenty-four hours a day. “Sound and fury signifying nothing.” indeed.

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