The major U.S. media have a bad habit of taking seriously things that aren’t really intended seriously. Like, when a party proposes legislation that is not intended to pass, but is intended either to raise money or properly frame campaign-year attack ads.
The thing is, reporters tend to know that the claptrap they are writing about is not serious, but they feel compelled to treat it as serious, because admitting that the politicians are insincere comes across as “taking sides” or “having an opinion.” God forbid.
When I was a visiting professor at Hillsdale College in 2012, I taught a course on writing political columns. I told the students that if you have a beer after deadline with a straight-news reporter, and you compliment her story, she might tell you what’s really going on behind the news story. “That part of the story — what’s really going on — is what a columnist should tell.”
But there’s no reason a reporter can’t tell it, too. Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg argues the same thing, basically, in his column on Hillary pretending not to be running for president:
My colleague Byron York lays bare Harry Reid’s cynical play of pretending he’s trying to fight money in politics:
It would be a service to readers if the rest of the press treated these silly plays with such honesty.
