The Washington press corps doesn’t have a freaking clue

The New York Times's new political newsletter author thinks the coming election will be fun to cover

I’ve been away for nearly two weeks, almost entirely unplugged, and let me tell you, a little distance makes the failure of the American political press even more horrifying and inexcusable.

The nation stands on the edge of a precipice, and our political media is so addicted to neutrality that it is casting both choices — survival or cataclysm — as equally plausible.

It’s sickening.

We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution.  And yet political journalists seem to think this is just fine. Fun, even.

I barely surfed the web while I was gone, but I did open a few emails here and there. And there was one I found particularly enlightening – in a very troubling way.

Being the lead writer for the New York Time’s signature On Politics newsletter is one of the most influential jobs in the industry these days, and the email that popped up in my inbox announcing the latest hire for that job – a Boston Globe reporter named Jess Bidgood who had previously worked for the Times — made it painfully clear that she is absolutely clueless about the topic she is now covering, and intentionally so.

Offered an opportunity to explain what she found particularly compelling about the coming election, Bidgood didn’t talk about how the Republican Party has succumbed to the extreme Christian far-right. She didn’t talk about how Trump was a hateful, dangerous demagogue. She didn’t even mention the fate of democracy or the rule of law.

Let me be very clear here: Whether or not the country succumbs to fascism is a helluva political story no matter how you feel about it. A Trump victory would profoundly change how government and justice are practiced. If you don’t understand that, you are a wildly incompetent political reporter.

You can choose to cover a race like that in different ways, but to deny what is going on is the act of a moron or a loon – or someone paid a lot of money to look the other way.

Instead of a probing analysis of the stakes, what Bidgood gave us in her welcoming remarks was just more of the generic political-journalist pablum about finding interesting stories and covering both sides and — yes — having fun.

The introductory email in question was written by the newsletter’s founding editor, Lisa Lerer, and grandiosely headlined: “Welcome to the Jess Bidgood Era.” (That is how seriously the Times takes itself.)

Here is what Bidgood said are her “favorite things” about covering politics:

Politics give us a window into this country — what’s shaping it, who’s shaping it, how people feel. When you cover politics, you’re covering people. You’re covering voters. You’re covering political figures, people bursting with ego and ambition as they fight for power. You’re covering the change people want and what kind of country we’re going to be. I love that.

And what an adventure it is! I’ve taken that special nighttime flight from Iowa to New Hampshire right after the Iowa caucuses, when a candidate stands on the tarmac in the dark and insists her big moment is still coming. (Oftentimes, it is not.) I’ve held in my hand a fake slate of electors that a swing state’s secretary of state received from Trump supporters in 2020 and decided to ignore. I’ve listened to L.G.B.T.Q. teens tell their school board who they are, and watched a community sick of high taxes disband its local government altogether. These are important political stories, big and small, and I can’t wait to bring them to On Politics.

It’s an adventure! Oh goodie. (For the rest of us, it’s a nightmare.)

What should people expect in the Jess Bidgood era?

This election is going to be strange, messy and deeply consequential, and every day this newsletter comes out, I’ll bring readers one idea, one story or one interview that will illuminate this country’s political morass.

And it will be fun. Really. I promise.

Yes, she actually said that. It will be fun.

She added a bit of bothsidesing, for good measure:

You won’t agree with everybody whose voice you hear, but you might understand them a little better.

And while my dream newsletter would be a primer on fascism, Bidgood’s would be something else altogether:

LL: So what would be your dream newsletter?

JB: My dream dream? That would be an interview with Taylor Swift, whose rain-drenched show I attended in Foxborough last year.

Fun!

Lest you think Bidgood was selling herself short, her first newsletter was about “How I Learned to Love the Rerun Election.” She is so psyched!

[T]oday — notwithstanding the fact that it is April 1 — I am here to make the case for the 2024 election, which I think will be as captivating, revealing and far-reaching as any in recent history, one that might turn less on the candidates we know than the voters who will choose them.

There was a brief discussion about the stakes, if you want to call it that:

Sure, Biden and Trump are both aging, white, former or current presidents. But they are astonishingly different candidates, and this race won’t be a personality contest or a beauty pageant.

Then it was back to the beauty contest language:

And at the end of the day, this race has elimination round energy. Each candidate, old as he may be, is hoping to vanquish the other for good.

This is not entirely Bidgood’s fault. It’s obviously exactly what her bosses were looking for when they hired her — those bosses being David Halbfinger, the political editor, Elisabeth Bumiller, the assistant managing editor and Washington bureau chief,  and Adam Pasick, the Times’s newsletter chief.

In a press release joyfully announcing Bidgood’s hire, they wrote that she “blew us away with her seemingly bottomless wellspring of ideas and creativity and with her clear and compelling vision of what On Politics would be in her hands: a centerpiece and showcase of The Times’s coverage of an election that will be ‘strange, messy and deeply consequential,’ as she put it, with writing that is ‘rooted in reporting, accessible to political outsiders and insightful to everyone.’”

There is nothing in either what they or Bidgood had to say that even remotely indicates that the stakes of this election are existential or that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to change the way we cover politics as a result.

I find this so profoundly depressing.

And yet, something else showed up in my email inbox on March 30 that gave me a bit of hope. It was not an email from the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. It was a newsletter from Chris Quinn, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The headline: “Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts.” Here’s what Quinn wrote:

This is a tough column to write, because I don’t want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I’ve started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle is hard to thread. No matter how I present it, I’ll offend some thoughtful, decent people.

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

Please read the whole thing. It’s marvelous. It’s what journalism ought to be.

It’s what the New York Times ought to be, but isn’t.