I don't often read Politico. It's free in paper form around the city, and I'm online almost all day, every day, but I have no use for a site that is essentially just another distribution system for press releases and talking points.
The thing is, it's not like they're even trying to pretend to be something else anymore.
Take a look, for example, at the various references to the "Doc Fix Memo" debacle sprinkled around the site.
Craig Gordon:
POLITICO circled back to the multiple Republican sources that had sent along the memo and asked if they could authenticate its Democratic origins. They could not, so POLITICO pulled the item from the website.
...
In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out.
Actually, Craig, there's another "old rule-of-thumb in journalism" that you should have followed first: check your fucking facts before publishing them, especially when political hacks are pushing them on you!
Craiggers tried to get in one last dig at the Democrats who called out his vaunted, storied, nearly three year-old publication:
By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar “doc fix,” maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.
Yeah, you got spoon-fed a bucket of bullshit by political operatives, and it's the Democrats' real intentions that need more investigating. Not the guys who sold you a bill of goods, but the guys they were trying to slime.
Make no mistake: this is a special kind of dumb we're seeing, and we should feel privileged as well as horrified by it.
Allow me to explain this to you veeeeeerrrrrrryyyyy ssssslllllloooooowwwwwwwlllllllllllllyyyyyyyy: when someone plays your outlet for a chump, your job is to Burn. Their. Asses. Hard.
Ben Smith does a little better, but not much:
There have been claims that the memo was a fabrication; I'd be surprised to learn that, just because it wasn't really all that explosive. Fabricators can do better. (Remember the Dan Rather documents?)
But while clearly POLITICO and others should have pressed on the memo's provenance more before posting, this seems like something that bears more reporting out. Somebody wrote the thing. I'd love to know who.
Okay, wanting to know who wrote it is legitimate, and I applaud the instinct to actually look into something instead of taking a flunky's word for it. But in case you forgot, the lesson from Rathergate was that you need to prove the document is authentic before relying on it. As ABC's Brian Ross put it, "isn't that really what journalists do?"
Yeah, it is what journalists do. Not Politico. But journalists.
Ben at least had the good grace to note that Politico didn't do its job (and I've long thought Ben is much better than the e-fishwrapper he writes for now). I think he's giving forgers more credit than they deserve, though: as we learned with the "Kenyan Birth Certificate," sometimes all you need is a half-assed idea and an audience desperate to believe what you're selling. In this case, a gaggle of GOP staffers found Politico staff writertranscriptionist Chris Frates, and what an audience he provided.
To be clear: the problem isn't just that Politico got hoodwinked, it's that their reporter never even seemed to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Congressional Republican staffers aren't the most scrupulously honest people when it comes to informing people about what's happening in health care news. (Incidentally, their notion of an "ideas piece" on HCR, on their site right now, is a joint op-ed by Michelle Bachmann and Steve King that repeats some of the same tired old bullshit we've been hearing for months: it covers millions of illegal immigrants, it forces people to pay for abortions, and, of course, that it "lays the foundation for socialized medicine" by cutting health care for seniors--you know, Medicare, that bastion of free-market values. No fact-check or rebuttal appears alongside this tripe from the two biggest idiots in the idiot pile known as the House Republican Caucus.) Nope, instead he swallowed what they gave him to swallow, and he did it with a smile.
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To be fair, it's not like being a crappy publication that will do anything for some right-wing readership is new for Politico. Hell, within their first two months of publication:
They screwed up coverage of the now-infamous Kerry “botched joke” by saying it was about the draft;
They ignored McCain’s flip-flopping on abortion and the religious right while praising him for consistency on abortion;
They flatly contradicted their own coverage of McCain’s positions;
They improperly edited a story, inserting the phrase “slow-bleed” to describe Democratic proposals for solving the Iraq crisis, then took eleven days to respond to Republican misattribution of that fabricated phrase and clarify that it wasn't a phrase coined by Democrats (in the 17th paragraph of an article called "Democrats Push New Strategy to Block Troop Increase"); and
In a move remarkably similar to today's screw-up, they erroneously announced John Edwards would suspend his campaign, based on the word of a single anonymous source, shortly before Edwards announced he wouldn't.
All that took them less than two months to screw up, they're still making the same damn errors today, and yet The Politico still tries to brand itself as a “publication by and for political junkies.”
Fair enough, but any junkie will tell you that once a dealer’s burned you a few times, you need to go elsewhere for your fix. The Politico is no more satisfying to a political junkie at this point than a bag of oregano is to Snoop Dogg. And they've been slinging the fake stuff for so long now they don't even recognize the difference.