The Washington Post | The New Yorker
The Post’s Dana Milbank comes clean in a column about “how little journalism occurs on the campaign trail.” He describes amusing scenes from scripted events where there were few voters, throngs of reporters and no real story to report:
This year turned out to be a particularly wasteful one in the Granite State. Once Romney won in Iowa, the question was not whether he would win here but by how much. Yet the reporters descended anyway: Our hotel rooms were nonrefundable.
But The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, responding to an earlier post by George Packer, writes that modern-day political reporting is no worse, and probably better, than thirty years ago.
[In the 60s and 70s] the quasi-monopolies produced some first-rate political journalism, but they also produced a lot of junk: glorified stenography, hagiographies disguised as inside accounts, and “authoritative” books as thick as doorsteps that no living soul could read from start to finish.
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