Simple Answers to Simple Questions, L'il Debbie Edition

Deborah Howell, the WaPo Apologist, asks:

But then along comes a financial crisis, and where besides major newspapers and their Web sites can readers get authoritative coverage of what is engulfing us?

The answer would be: blogs.

I hate to tell you, Debbie, but until just this past week, when the WaPo finally published a fairly comprehensive explanation of the current financial meltdown, it had been MIA in that department. (I'd made my feelings known to Howell via email and phone messages.)

Unfortunately, this came two weeks after the final Congressional votes on the bailout.

At the time that Congress was considering the different bailout packages, the WaPo was completely useless. It took the position that we should hand over a rather astronomical sum of money to the Serious People to give to the Big Non-Banks, and anyone who objected was wrongheaded. Our comprehension wasn't required, only our checkbook.

What understanding of the crisis I had was gleaned entirely from blogs: from DeLong and Krugman, from Atrios and Calculated Risk. It helped that Brad DeLong had been writing about the housing bubble for years, and that Atrios had been writing about the Big Shitpile of toxic securities since sometime last year. (I'd love to know when he first used the term.)

The truth is, whenever a newsworthy issue could use a bit of intelligent analysis, I turn to blogs, not newspapers. What newspaper has explained the problems with our current healthcare system, the impact of the various candidates' proposals, and what other countries are doing, nearly as well as Ezra Klein has done all by himself?

During the past week or so, as McCain and the wingnuts have been trying to make an issue of ACORN, who has done a better job of explaining the facts than TPM? (And who was on the closely related story of the U.S. Attorney firings back at the beginning of 2007, when the WaPo and most of the major media outlets were saying there was no story there?)

As gasoline prices continue to fluctuate wildly, where are the media outlets that have had a decent discussion of the potential benefits of improved mass transit, and the roadblocks to those benefits (like parking requirements) like I've been reading over the past few months at Matt Yglesias' and Ryan Avent's and Atrios' and Ezra's blogs?

Blogs have been stepping up on all of these issues, and on many more, while our 'elite' newspapers have been dropping the ball.

This Morning's Broder: Don't Ask Me Why Reporting Sucks

This morning's Broder column isn't all that bad, really, by the standard of Broder columns generally. He takes the candidates through a back-and-forth about the current tone of the campaign, and ultimately gives Obama the last word.

But the operative phrase is still "by the standard of Broder columns generally." Let's roll tape:

The first question I asked John McCain and then Barack Obama was: How do you feel about the tone and direction of the campaign so far?

"I'm very sorry about it," McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. "I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings" together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.

Eventually - about four paragraphs from the end of the column - Broder lets Obama shoot that down:

I asked Obama if he had any regrets about turning down McCain's early June invitation to start the joint appearances back then. He said, "I think the notion that somehow as a consequence of not having joint appearances, Senator McCain felt obliged to suggest that I'd rather lose a war to win a campaign doesn't automatically follow. I think we each have control over ourselves and our campaigns, and we have to take responsibility for that."

This was obvious from the get-go: of course no town halls didn't mean McCain would have to launch bullshit attacks over Obama not visiting soldiers and the like. Broder could have used his editorial voice to shoot down such a ridiculous idea himself, if it weren't for his famed faux neutrality. If Obama hadn't done so, though, there's no reason to expect Broder would have filled the gap. Apparently using a column to speak the truth, where the truth has a partisan bias, is something Broder regards as out of bounds.

But the real travesty of this column is that Broder is asking the candidates what can be done to focus the campaign on issues. But here he is, the Dean of Washington Journalism and Punditry, the voice of one of the most respected newspapers in the nation. Might there be something he could do - like, I don't know, influence his own paper to give more coverage to what the candidates say about the issues?

It's not that the candidates aren't addressing the issues periodically - but you'd never know it from how the campaigns are portrayed in the news. Maybe Broder's paper could do something about that.

I know that sounds pretty radical, but I've gotta be me.

Even failing that, he's still got this column, which appears in the WaPo and a googolplex of other newspapers across the country twice each week. Maybe he could use some of those columns to compare what the candidates are saying about the issues. He could do that himself, even if nobody else played along.

But no: that would be too much to ask. He and his newspaper are helpless to direct the campaign back towards the issues, no matter how much they say that's what they'd like to see.