Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Yes, it's yet another example of journamalism from that inferior bird-cage liner that is the Washington Post. I thought Josh Micah Marshall must be exaggerating David Broder's latest column for effect. But David Broder's column tonight really is that bad:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: September 17, 2006 - September 23, 2006 Archives: Shorter David Broder: Bush is a lawless president at war with the constitution. Also, Gore and Kerry, who opposed him, are know-it-alls I don't like. Hopefully Republican moderates and Lieberman can all get reelected so the country can be saved.

Can't see why anybody pays for it, even now. Suggestions as to why anybody might pay for it would be welcome.

So: a contest: what have you learned in the past month from the Post that you couldn't have learned more reliably at the same or lower price elsewhere? What have you learned that you didn't have to verify before you could trust it?

Comments

[ChrisH]

First time commenter (but long time reader) so go easy, but looking back over the last 5 years, it seems like a distinction needs to be made between a) the editorial columns and the news, and particularly b) the domestic politics and economics vs. the national security at the WaPo. I'll readily agree that you get nothing (or very little at any rate) useful from Broders and Weismans and Kurtz's, but what of the work of Dana Priest, Dafna Linzer, Walter Pincus, et al.? Going back, would you trust the WMD coverage of the NY Times or the WaPo (the new stories, not the editorials) better?

[sglover]

Wow.... Broder manages to out-fuckwit himself.

The most hilarious line -- to this former Detroiter, anyway -- is how the penultimate Beltway gasbag identifies himself as a "Midwesterner". But then, GW Bush is jes a good ole boy from Midland Texas, right?

[Adam]

Restaurant reviews... when I was living in north Arlington, it was VERY hard to tell the good from the overdone and overpriced. The Post reviewers have, I found, a pretty good track record.

Also, Dana Priest.

Remember what Brad said about the cost of the WSJ with and without its editorial page.

[Gwailo]

The WaPo seems to be doing a reasonable job of following the HP spy scandal story -- or at least spurring on the NYTimes and the WSJ. Of course, the fact that HP was spying on *journalists* might have something to do with the degree of indignation they express. What a great case study in business ethics -- the Chief Ethics Officer e-mailing the head plumber "I'm sorry I asked" if what we're doing is legal.

News coverage seems to follow a simple inverse proportionality law: the closer you actually are to an event, the less accurate the reporting appears to be.

[Matt McIrvin]

Yeah, but you have to admit that the appearance of a particle of The Shrill in a David Broder column is a pretty epochal event. Granted, it annihilates itself almost immediately.

[RichB]

Reading Brad's blog, I've often thought he was overly harsh on the Post, but, wow, after reading Broder's column, I'm thinking I was wrong. The "Independence Party" is so obviously nothing but the same old schtick of life-long politicians labeling themselves as not-from-Warshington outsiders.

[Justin Dangel]

The Post's article last weekend on hiring for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Still waiting for Watergate II.

[supersaurus]

froomkin is pretty good, makes me wonder why management hasn't fired him for contradicting the party line.

[John Emerson]

I keep expecting Broder to disintegrate in the middle of a sentence, like the Wicked Witch of the West, with his body parts shelving off and falling to the floor one by one onto a fragrant heap of jellylike putrefaction.

[Ralph Hitchens]

I read it for coverage of local (DC metro area) politics and, of course, the business section. The bridge column & occasionally a few other features in Style, the Wednesday Food Section, that sort of thing. For national news coverage any thinking person looks first to the blogosphere, right?

[elliottg]

The Post's online presence is the right price and has Gene Wiengarten and Froomkin. In addition, you get access to all Post articles and they are a better news aggregator than CNN.

[Joe S.]

Brad,
I think you only read the commentary and political news. What I can say in defense of the Post is that it is the only general circulation paper whose local (and much national) news is written from a black perspective. It is quite friendly to general readers, but the perspective is definitely there. Compare with the Times' local news: written for Manhattan yuppies from the German-Jewish/Southern-WASP general perspective of the Times.

(Since I'm getting ethnic here, I happen to be a Eastern European Jew myself. Mostly Galitzianer.)

[R. Kane]

Reasons to read it still: Dana Priest, Tom Ricks, E.J. Dionne, Harold Myerson,(and occasionally George Will believe it or not when he forgets to be a Republican hack), the coverage of all the potential scandals at Interior and DoD that this Republican congress works so hard to ignore. In sports, Mike Wilbon, Tom Boswell and Tony Kornheiser and finally the "things to do around town" stuff.

It also works well as cat litterbox liner, especially the Robert Novak columns.

[Emma Anne]

Chris H: "Going back, would you trust the WMD coverage of the NY Times or the WaPo (the new stories, not the editorials) better?"

But Knight Ridder was so much better than either that it is hard to give the WP much credit.

Joe S. and others: I am glad that the local coverage is so worthwhile. Perhaps a big shakeup could still save the paper.

[John Emerson]

Knight Ridder has merged with the McClatchie chain which runs the Minneapolis Star - Tribune. The Mpls paper is very thin, but its editorial policy is as good as any commercial paper in the country. If the two sides work together, the Strib and/or KR's Philly Inquirer might be pumped up into a major national paper.

I can dream. The opposite is more likely, stripping both sides of the operation down to an affordable minimum.

[R. Kane]

One thing about this detainee torture debate, it has shoved the Iraq war onto the back pages and off of NPR and cable news even as the war intensifies and American casualties rise. See page A-19 of today's WaPo for instance. This was one of Karl Rove's prime motives.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is also another WaPo asset.

[R. Stanton Scott]

Pretty good comics section, and good baseball coverage--for only 35 cents a day.

[Sharon]

The Post far better than my hometown paper, the truly awful Baltimore Sun.

As people mentioned before, Priest, Ricks, Pincus, Meyerson, and I'll put in a plug for Gene Robinson (underrated strong, liberal voice in the op-ed section, he makes Cohen look like the mincing DINO that he is)

And yes the Style section, not as absolutely brilliant the way that it was back in the late 70s and 80s, but it has it's moments.

[Kenneth Almquist]

From Broder's column: What it really signals is a new movement in this country -- what you could rightly call the independence party. Its unifying theme can be found in the Declaration of Independence's language when Jefferson invoked "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

To see what Republicans think of this idea, google "global test" and "Kerry." In contrast, the Democratic party (which , you may recall, was founded by Thomas Jefferson) has never had a problem with the Declaration of Independence. But Broder prefers to talk about a "new movement" rather than admit that Kerry was right about something. After all, Kerry (like, I suspect, many of the Founding Fathers), is a "know-it-all."

As Brad says, "it really is that bad."

[RT]

News: in addition to the reporters others have named, Barton Gellman is one of the great reporters of our time.

His overlooked May 11, 2003 story (oops, we forgot to secure the WMD sites while invading - why exactly did we fight this war again?) alone is sufficient evidence for impeachment:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A40212-2003May10&notFound=true

Good sports coverage (especially Wilbon), a decent comics page, and in general, if you want to read a hard-copy newspaper while sipping your morning coffee with a cat on your lap, there's really no other choice if you're a DC-area resident.

But Hiatt, Broder, Samuelson (stupid again yesterday, big surprise), Cohen, Will, Krauthammer, Novak (basically an inside-the-Beltway gossip columnist), and the whole rest of their op-ed page other than Robinson, Meyerson, and Dionne can just drop dead. (It seems that's the only way for one to lose one's hold on that valuable real estate - it's like being a tenured college professor, only you've got an audience of millions.)

[sm]

The WP has real stuff in it. It's the NYT that I stopped reading even for free when I realized that looking at their headlines made me dull and stupid, and actually reading the articles...well!

NYT Science articles can be very good, but reading a lot of other news sources seldom leads me back to the foreign and political articles in the Times. It's vacuous.

[RT]

If you swapped the editorial and op-ed pages of the WaPo with those of the NY Times, the WaPo would be almost half decent.

On the other hand, the NY Times would be totally vacuous.

[Steve]

My liberal bonafides are as good as anyone and I love the Post. Yeah, its editorial department has lost its way on national security and Broder is an idiot. But for my money (and I make my living as a professor of American government) you do not find better coverage of domestic politics in this country. Plus Kornheiser, Wilbon, and the whole Style section are great.

[Mike]

Shoppers Food Warehouse has boneless, skinless, chicken breasts on sale this week. Time to stock the freezer.

Their Sunday "Outlook" section used to be pretty good, but it totally sucks now that Michael Grunwald is guaranteed space for vacuous columns.

I came "this close" to cancelling home delivery last Sunday - and I'm a news junkie and they had excerpted Emerald City

[Kenneth Almquist]

Another quote from Broder's column: A "decent respect" begins at home, with an acknowledgment of public opinion. Americans are saying no to excess greenhouse gases and no to open borders; yes to embryonic stem cell research, yes to a path to earned citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and yes to a living wage.

Ned Lamont is one of the Americans saying these things. But I had to go to nedlamont.com to verify this; Broder didn't consider this important enough to mention. You see, bloggers are foulmouthed leftists and they favor Lamont. A Lieberman victory "would signal that independence is a virtue to be rewarded." Broder doesn't say what Lieberman has "independence" from, but presumably he means the blogosphere. In other words, Lieberman's key qualification for office is not his positions on the issues, but the fact that he has succeeded in alienating the people in his constituency who write blogs. (I suppose the fact that he's succeeded in alienating a lot of Democrats who don't write blogs is an added bonus.)

If I've misrepresented Broder's position, it's not intentional. Broder's article really is that bad.

[Easter Lemming Liberal News]

To answer Brad's question - One story buried in the back pages much like their stories buried in the back pages leading up to the Iraq War by Pincus.

"The Senate committee report on Iranian nuclear developments denounced by UN agency as false and inaccurate."

A 'Groundhog Day' moment that rather confirms an attack on Iran is only weeks or a few months away.

[andres]

Well, to comment late, let me add that I love some of the posts cartoonists (Toles, Carlson, and Oliphant; they also ought to offer Jules Pfeiffer a whole hell of a lot more than he made before he quit cartooning).

Anyway, just like the WSJ, Brad should focus on the quality of its reporting outside of the op-ed page, which is truly execrable. If Brad's previous posts are any guide, there's not much there either, but judging the WaPo's quality by reading Broder's columns is like judging the quality of a horse by looking under its tail.