Politico explains what is wrong with political news coverage

Apparently the political reporters aren't all narcissists (like Mr. Ego himself, Chris Matthews) and totally oblivious to their professional failings. But it took the reportorial disaster represented by the Press pile-on on Hillary Clinton just before she won New Hampshire and demonstrated the level of their incompetence for any of them to actually publish an article describing the problem. And even now, it is an on-line publication, not print or TV. From today's Politico:

By: John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei
January 10, 2008 04:15 PM EST

New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us.

"Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

New Hampshire was jarring because it offered in highly concentrated form all the dysfunctions and maladies that have periodically afflicted political journalism for years.

Let’s look back at some of the bogus narratives of this election so far.

There was the “John McCain is dead” story line from last summer. Weak fundraising, poor polls, a backlash from conservatives and staff disarray had doomed his candidacy.

Never mind.

Then there was Iowa. The caucuses, we wrote, are all about organization. Except they were won on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who had only the barest-bones organization.

D’oh!

Or Barack Obama. The reason his candidacy was not taking flight, as the wisdom had it last fall, was that he was preaching a bland message of unity and civility in a year when Democrats were eager for a sharper, more confrontational and more partisan message.

Guess not.

These were only appetizers to the main course of humiliation. After a barrage of coverage that all but anointed Obama as the New Hampshire winner and declared him the clear front-runner for the nomination, that exercise in groupthink was stopped cold by the actual votes.

Whoops.

Looks like we have a trend here. Our own publication, Politico, did its part in promoting several of these flimsy story lines. We used predictive language in stories. We amplified certain trends and muffled the caveat, which perhaps should be printed with every story, like a surgeon general’s warning: “We don’t know what will happen until voters vote.”

The authors go on to describe what they see as the major trends that have caused the problem. Let me write just the titles and a little detail here:

1. Horse race frenzy "We cover polls we know to be statistically suspect, from firms we know use questionable methodology. Most of all, we treat even legitimate polls as holy writs, rather than simply snapshots of the general contours of a race. "


2. The echo chamber "you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it. "


3. Personal bias '... it has been tough to avoid a sense this week that some of the coverage has been shaped by journalists rooting for certain outcomes — either because they think it’s the better story or simply the one they’d prefer to see."
   
   
   • NBC’s Brian Williams stirred some controversy earlier in the week when he reported that his network’s correspondent covering Obama admitted it was hard to be objective covering the Illinois senator. Reporters are human, and some did seem swept up in the same emotions many voters experienced when they saw a black man win snow-white Iowa by preaching a gospel of change. Many are sympathetic to Obama’s argument that the culture of Washington politics is fundamentally broken.
   
   
   • McCain also benefits from the personal sentiments of reporters. Many journalists are enamored with McCain because of the access he gives and, above all, the belief that he is free of political artifice
   
   
   • Hillary Clinton, cautious and scripted, got the reverse treatment. She is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media.

But here is the final line of Politico's article

"As far as what’s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think."

Two questions. First, will any of the rest of the political Press even notice this article - at least officially? Second, will anyone in the Press, even if they take note of this article, actually act on it?

I don't count on it. Particularly on TV the Press is more about reportorial ego than any real explanation of what the facts are. I'm not especially confident that the answer to either of my questions will be positive. The point that has failed more than the reporters themselves has been the editors - assuming there are any. (Does anyone edit Chris Matthews? Obviously not.] But it's nice to know that a few journalists can actually be shocked by their own excesses into writing about themselves and their profession. The Press itself is one of the least reported businesses in America, and they resist outside criticism.

[ h/t to Greg Sargent at TPM. ]