Politics dude doesn't think WaPo's Nats writer can handle politics

Is Warren G. Harding a Hall of Famer or just the Hall of Pretty Good?

 

Of course.

Welp, the troll won.

 

FDR was just a compiler.

 

Politics beat is terrific right now. Prestige, leaks all over, seismic change, a president loathed by the very people who want your product. This is the best time to speak truth to power.

Now, once the progressives take over and the journalism is expected to be PR, not as fun.

 

On one level, national politics is probably easier than covering a professional sports team. A candidate goes somewhere and says X. A House committee or a think-tank releases a report that says Y. Those kind of stories could be written by a decent reporter on a college newspaper. And I bet the first baseman of the Nationals wasn't directly emailing her quotes right after a game, the way politicians and their press folk do whenever an issue comes up.

On the other hand, covering politics at this level is a lot about developing below-the-line contacts. Folks on congressional staff, grunts working on state campaigns. That's where the good stuff comes in. You also have to know where to look for publicly released information. So yeah, it should be interesting to see how she adapts.

 

And to be fair, Janes has been covering Presidential Races for years.

 

D.O.,

Tip your cap and take a lap.

Very well played!

 

Seems like some folks are missing the point - he's not saying she won't succeed at covering politics because she covers sports...actually, the opposite. He's taking issue with the fact that, these days, the media covers politics as if they are sports, with breathless minute-by-minute coverage of POLLS and RESULTS and DRAMA and SCANDAL and ACCESS and all the he-said she-said bullshit instead of substantive, definitive reporting on and analysis of the actual issues in play. So, really, he's saying that a sports reporter is perfectly qualified to cover politics the way the Post wants them covered.

 

Which of course is implying that the way she covered the Nats was all drama and no substance, which is of course false in every way.

 

If that's what he was implying, then, yeah, of course it's false, because Chelsea is very good. I personally doubt he has any idea who Chelsea is, or even reads sports coverage. I think he was actually stereotyping sports writing in general, suggesting that it is focused solely on the final score and the surface-level drama, and he was using that to support his broader point about political coverage. In general, I think the point he was trying to make is correct as far as the manner in which the majority of media covers everything. That's not to say that I think the Post's transfer of Chelsea supports that point. I don't.

 

The problem with people trying to tell me how better things were 50 years ago — political reporting included — is I now have access to all the shit they're holding up as paragons. Political reporting was just as gossipy and results-based, because it's politics.

 

Hell, I don't know if they ever talked to voters 50 years ago, or actually looked into issues that were of importance to particular regions. Mostly they talked to party power brokers.