Shocker: Top Editors at 'Politico' Admit They -- And Others -- Have Screwed Up Campaign Coverage

By: E&P Staff The two top editors of the newspaper Politico and Politico.com -- each a former top Washington Post reporter -- admit the "horse race" coverage of the current campaign has gotten totally out of hand, in the wake of New Hampshire.

A piece by John Harris and Jim VandeHei at politico.com is titled "Why reporters get it wrong" and includes terms like "Whoops" and "D'oh." They hit the reliance on polls, the deadening "echo chamber," and claim reporters actively root for candidates to make things interesting. They promise to do better.

It closes: "Things are not all bad. Politico is part of a broad, technology-inspired movement that has led to more open and more exhaustive coverage of this presidential race than ever before. A lot of that coverage is damn good. As far as what?s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think."

One surprise is that in the section on the echo chamber, the two seem to suggest that they and their colleagues on the campaign are all quite conservative, in citing everyone's obsession with the same sites: "Check out the nicer restaurants in Manchester, N.H., or Des Moines, Iowa, in the political season and you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites ? the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time?s 'The Page' ? to see what each other is writing, and it?s only human nature to respond to it."

Here is how it starts.
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New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser ? not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far ? was us.

"Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently ? and so rashly ? stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

New Hampshire was jarring because it offered in highly concentrated form all the dysfunctions and maladies that have periodically afflicted political journalism for years.
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