Here's Jay Rosen:
Nobody knows exactly when it happened. But at some point between Teddy White’s The Making of the President, 1960 and the Willie Horton ads in 1988, political journalism in this country lost the plot. When it got overly interested in the inside game, it turned you and me and everyone who has to go into the voting booth and make a decision into an object of technique, which it then tried to assess. We became the people on whom the masters of politics practiced their craft.Here's Dave Weigel on Cillizza being more interested in "the inside game" than in explaining things that are "complicated":
That's similar to what Cillizza wrote about the CBO report. "The Republican ad on this CBO report writes itself: Job losses, botched rollout, etc," he explained. "The Democratic one is WAY more complicated as it relies on explaining the idea that a decline in the labor market isn't the same thing as job losses and that all of this could well wind up being a good thing for the public."
Sure, it's more complicated, but the journalist—any journalist—is better equipped to find the truth than he is to explain how someone might lie about it, and how the lie might work.Or, as NBC's Chuck "Not My Job, Man" Todd would say, it's not my job to sort out the truth.
