Our broken political press and the clerical chimpanzee

Is Matt Taibbi in Merchants of Trivia Rolling Stone 01/10/08 intending to criticize our broken press corps? Or is he unintentionally letting something slip? Either way, it says a lot about how broken our political press is:

Every reporter who spends any real time on the campaign trail gets wrapped up in the horse race. It's inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole thing has to offer: the ending.

Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren't watching politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the next four years. That's the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don't get to sit at that table.

Instead, we get to be herded day after day into one completely controlled environment after another, where we listen to an array of ideologically similar politicians deliver professionally crafted advertising messages that we, in turn, have the privilege of delivering to the public free of charge. We rarely get to ask the candidates real questions, and even when we do, they almost never answer.

If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it could probably do the job. The only thing that elevates this work above monkey level is that we get to guess who wins. (my emphasis)

His comment that "most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job" is really telling. It doesn't have to be that way. But our "press corps" today doesn't have the imagination or the energy to do much more than clerical work in their reporting.

But that is also a very incomplete statement of the problem. Because their clerical note-taking is often very selective. They like to take down quotes about mistakes and attacks. But doing even clerical work on what the candidates say about actual issues seems too much effort to most of them. Let alone actually researching the claims they use to support their positions.

Is it true that reporters "rarely get to ask the candidates real questions"? I don't know exactly what he means in terms of access to the candidates. But what's pretty clear is that what they do ask the candidates, especially on TV coverage, doesn't sound much like "real questions" a lot of the time. Taibbi seems to imply this is somehow the candidates' fault. Isn't it supposed to be, like, the job of the journalists to ask "real questions"?

But when he writes, "If you could train a chimpanzee to sit still through a Joe Biden speech, it could probably do the job", it's hard to argue with that. I don't mean whether or not Biden's speeches are boring. But even Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby wouldn't argue that "you could train a chimpanzee" to do the job much of our Establishment press is doing these days.

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, matt taibbi