Part of the problem also stems from really bad reporting, too. There are incidents all over the place of just plain, flat-out lousy reporting.
In the post to which this comment was added, I called David Broder one of the best political reporters of our time. At one time, that might have been true. Yet, the very opening of today's column is forcing me to wish I had never written those words.
Barack Obama has reached the moment of truth for answering the persistent question about his core beliefs and political priorities. The coming votes in the House and Senate on his signature health-care reform effort will tell us more about the president than anything so far in his White House tenure.
A reporter is supposed to be paying attention. A reporter is supposed to be able to string together various incidents creating an intelligible whole. While it might be the case that individual statements, especially on health care reform, suggest a refusal to take a firm stand, this hardly means that the President faces "persistent question[s] about his core beliefs and political priorities". Through the course of his column, Broder never once names who is asking these questions, let alone specifically what those "persistent questions" might be.
Rather, the narrative he weaves is one straight out of the Republican playbook, and has little to do with "questions" about his beliefs or political ideology.
All during last year's campaign, Obama skillfully skirted the question of whether he was a moderate, consensus-seeking pragmatist, as his words suggested, or a faithful adherent to the liberal agenda, as his voting record demonstrated.
In stylistic terms, he cultivated the pragmatic image. On issues, he was alternately one or the other -- lining up with the liberals on Iraq and civil liberties, for example, but joining the hard-liners on Afghanistan and the budget.
In the campaign, he took the moderate side of the health-care debate -- disagreeing with Hillary Clinton on the necessity for an individual mandate to buy health insurance and suggesting that he would be satisfied with incremental progress toward covering all the uninsured.
But now, a number of factors have combined to strip him of the camouflage that he once enjoyed when it comes to health-care policy.(emphasis added)
Camouflage? What does that even mean?!?
The whole column is nonsense. While I am quite willing to accept that Glenn Beck is both stupid and ignorant enough to believe much of what he says about the President, I refuse to give Broder the same benefit of the doubt. Any observer of the President - and he was the junior Senator from my state for four years and I paid attention to what he said and did - would know that, at heart, the President is indeed a pragmatist. He has no "ideology" per se, other than getting stuff done for people. There is no other conclusion one can reach from a careful examination of his record, whether in the Illinois state legislature, or the United States Senate, or the White House.
Since I refuse to believe for one moment that Broder believes any of his assertions, one has to wonder, then, why he wrote the column. Bad reporting, combined with a familiar, and partisan, take on the President's approach to governance that is at variance with the facts at hand leads me to a couple conclusions, neither of which excludes the other. Either Broder is really stupid and believes this (despite my refusal to grant him that stupidity) or he is playing a partisan role here.
Of course, this seems to be part of a larger trend at the Post, noted by Glenn Greenwald and Matt Yglesias:
[O]ne is once again left with the profound crisis facing the employees of the Washington Post. Simply put, they all work for an institution that seems utterly indifferent to whether the people who write for the paper are informing the readers or deliberately trying to mislead them. That hurts their credibility, each and every one of them. It also means that whenever any of them do good work, they raise the prestige and credibility of an organization that dedicates a substantial quality of valuable real estate to deliberate efforts to mislead the public about the single most important issue of our time. It’s a very serious problem.
While this addresses, specifically, the multiple ways the Post seems to misinform readers on global warming - from (again) bad reporting to the factually inaccurate pieces offered by George Will - the same could be said across the board, including the recent controversy over the decision by the Swiss to deport rapist movie director Roman Polanski. Sometimes at odds with itself, very often at odds with basic factual material, the Post seems to be on a steep dive toward oblivion.
Add today's column by David Broder to the weight dragging the paper down.
