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I’ve been having a series of discussions about press coverage over the last couple weeks and they’ve drawn some seemingly not entirely related issues together in my mind. So this post won’t have a fully linear structure or focused point. It’s more collecting together notes I’ve been keeping in my head.
In a staff discussion several days ago we got to talking about how recently a lot of political press reporting just seems … well, bad. Everyone’s a critic of course. And TPM has always been critical of many things about mainstream media. But it seems worse. So we were discussing, is that really the case? Is it different? And if so, why would that be? We didn’t come up with any answers but we discussed some structural factors that I think play at least some significant role.
As is the case in most professions, you’re shaped by your experiences, mentors and the zeitgeist of your early years in the field. For the bulk of working political reporters these days, those experiences don’t go back much further than the early Politico era, which began in 2007. I don’t mean to beat up on the Politico of 2024 — it isn’t the Politico of 2007. Often, today, Politico’s coverage is better than that of the Times or the Post or other legacy publications.
But that earlier era of Politico is the origination point of the style of coverage that is dominant in political reporting today: “winning the day,” narrative driving, meta-story over story, “takes.” That era of Politico was also DC-centric in a way that was genuinely novel at the time. So in a way, all of today’s dominant political journalism, the great majority of which is DC-based, is a descendent of Politico’s innovations for better and worse. To the extent one still has the idea that the Times, for instance, is different, or some older thing, that’s not the case. Quite a few of the Times’s biggest stars were poached from Politico, and the many more who were not were acculturated in the Politico era.
A few additional factors are worth mentioning. In the past many reporters got their starts at regional dailies with their own vital journalistic traditions, or the DC bureaus of those same dailies. But most of those don’t exist anymore because of the changes in the industry. So that’s an education in fundamentals that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t exist in the same way. An additional factor is that almost a generation of buy-outs of mid and late career reporters means there just aren’t that many people working in journalism much older than people like me (I’m 55).
For someone who thinks a lot about the past and tries to think critically about how we think about the past I don’t want to over-glorify that older ecosystem. But it was a different ecosystem. And the point that I’m trying to make here is that to the extent that things suddenly seem a bit worse or a bit more untethered than they seemed even in the recent past this may be part of the reason. The dominant experience and ethos of political journalism today is a product of the DC-centric, Politico era and there’s very little left from the prior era of journalism to provide a ballast against its worst tendencies.
I want to stress this point again — not to avoid offense but genuinely for accuracy. I’m not beating up on Politico, which is a very different operation today than it was then. I’m talking about the mores, styles, assumptions which its launch began.
Now let me shift to a totally different conversation but one that in my mind had some overlap. A friend was emailing me as we watched yesterday’s convention coverage and marveling that the Democratic Party had all these star talents but he had barely heard of a lot of them. I didn’t really quite agree on that point. I mean, it’s almost a cliche that the Dems have such an impressive bench these days with all these rising, star governors. That in itself was part of the pressure for Biden to step aside going back 18 months. There were so many options, etc. But to the extent I agreed, it seemed more an issue of people in DC, in federal office, getting some press coverage, while those outside of DC — such as the governors — got less. And what occurred to me there is the difference between the DC press and the press outside of DC.
When I mentioned above that the political press is now increasingly DC-centric, that sounds kind of funny. How can American political press not be DC-centric since that’s the national capital? But it’s a bit different from that. I’ve noted many times the economics of journalism inside DC are totally different from anywhere else in the country. I know this firsthand because we used to be part of it, part of that business model. Everywhere in U.S. journalism is, at best, in turmoil: whole wastelands of news deserts, people trying new models to see what might work. But in DC it’s quite different. New publications are still starting up with hopes of big profits: Punchbowl, Semafor and others.
This plays somehow into the equation. DC has its own logic. It remains, decades after Reagan, wired for the GOP. It’s mores and its journalistic mores are amplified because in-DC political press has a robust business model while political journalism outside DC is withering and desiccated.