Yesterday, Ezra Klein and Brad DeLong began a discussion about the sorry state of professional journalism in America today. I mentioned and responded to Ezra yesterday. Today, Brad Delong passed along this from one of his commenters:
I repeat my previous suggestion for the "baseball test." A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.
Which prompted Kevin Drum to write this:
Man, does this seem backward. If you asked me what was wrong with big-league political reporting in this country, I'd say its biggest problem is that is has too much in common with big league sports writing. Reporters like Adam Nagourney and John Harris don't lack for expertise in politics, after all. They have trainloads of it. Their problem is precisely that they treat politics the way sportwriters treat baseball: as a game, in which both sides are equivalent, you're not supposed to play favorites, you favor polls and statistics over substantive (but boring!) analysis, trivia is a source of endless fascination, and a clever bon mot is irresistable regardless of whether it's actually fair or accurate.
As neither Ezra or Brad have responded yet, allow me. Kevin is, I think, confusing two separate phenomenon here, and what's interesting is that he's off in precisely the same way that modern journalism is off. And his example of Adam Nagourney demonstrates that perfectly. Nagourney has, it would seem, excellent knowledge about the political process. He apparently knows nothing, however, about policy. In fact, after reading Nagourney consistently for the past few years, I'd say that he doesn't even bother to recognize the distinction between politics and policy at all. To Nagourney, its all a political game. The problem, of course, is that it is not.
The political process is the layer that sits atop policy. It shapes it, constrains is, enables it, creates it, and destroys it. But it isn't it. The politics of health care policy, for example, isn't the same thing as health care policy itself. But in reporting about health care policy, the only thing Nagourney ever seems to talk about is the politics that surrounds it. He never actually digs into the details. And my guess is that Ezra has perfectly explained why - health care policy isn't something that Nagourney knows all that much about.
Politics and policy aren't the same, nor should they be. Ezra's call for more area expertise wasn't a call for more journalists who are experts in politics; it was a call for more journalists who are experts in policy. Ezra:
If you want to be an economic reporter, you should have some training in economics. If you want to do health policy, you should have to demonstrate some fluency with the policy issues involved, and the relevant research. So far as I can tell, the problem in journalism is that there are far too many trained reporters, and far too few researchers, and experts in their subject matter.
Reporters report on process because that is all they know. Researchers and experts, on the other hand, can see beyond the process to the policy that lies underneath.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
