Category Archives: Media Watch

06.22.16
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TRONC! Today is a TRONC Day. TRONC Today. TRONC Forever.

It’s somehow completely slipped this blog’s mind to talk about the Tribune Company rebranding itself as TRONC: Tribune Online Content. I don’t think I really wanted to think about it, or believe it, for while the Tribune has frequently lost its damn mind, I still wanted it to be, you know, a newspaper. But we are not! We are TRONC. TRONC. Say it loud and there’s music playing. Say it soft, and it’s almost like a robot staring unblinkingly at you while it dispassionately burns down your house.

How bad is it? Well, if you didn’t think it could get any worse than establishing itself as a “content curation and monetization engine”, then you haven’t been paying attention to the present. As Verge reported the other day, “the leaders of the Tronc empire unveiled phase two of their plan: the gradual transformation of the company into a series of video embeds.”

Does that not sound terrible? Then you haven’t watched the video.

 

Luxuriate in this hideousness. “The future of journalism. The future of content.” These two bloodless technobabblers are the vampiric  avatars of a joyless future. “Harness the power of local journalism. Feed it into a funnel. And then optimize it to reach the broadest global audience.” Sounds great! Except that it means “what’s trending on Reddit now? Trouble in Palestine? Waukesha? Nah, it’s a dog on a tricycle!”

Or, as The Verge puts it (and really, read their piece: it’s perfect).

The basic idea here is that Tronc will syndicate articles and videos across its properties. Which is fine! But there’s not much money in text, and so Tronc is leaning hard into video. Today, 16 percent of the company’s articles include an embedded video; that number will more than double to 50 percent next year. But what if the article I just wrote doesn’t make sense as a video, you might ask? Congratulations! You’ve just been laid off.

Look, it’s a different market. Video is important. We watch video, and it makes a profit. I totally get that. But the trick is not to gear journalism around video; it’s to make the video relevant to journalism. That’s what we’re losing. In a rush to be viral, to make every story “Seth Meyers CRUSHES Trump”, we lose something.

Basically, it’s this. At the end, the nice lady from the grimmest of all possible futures says, boldly, without any embarrassment, “We’re a content company. First. Last. And always.” Content. Content. In my day job, I am a “Senior Content Developer”, B2B and B2C. I work hard and try to write interesting articles, that help our clients but are also readable and engaging, and hopefully in which you can learn something. I try to do my best. But I know what content is. It’s marketing, plain and simple. To reduce everything to “content” is to erase what journalism is. To transform the Tribune papers, which include the excellent LA Times, is to damage our civic knowledge, our democracy, and probably our intelligence.

Luckily, it seems that other papers are trying to embrace the new world differently, letting Facebook be the guardian. It isn’t ideal, but it allows for journalism. TRONC is a way around that, trying to beat the reductors at their own game. Goddamn, I hope it fails.

06.15.16
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Trump and “Crooked”, Thieving Soldiers: I Mean, He’s Sort of Right

three-kings

“Oh, good, the news is on!” -Donald Trump

So Donald Trump in a rally yesterday took the politically…unusual step of accusing American service men and women of theft in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Iraq, crooked as hell,” Trump told a crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina. “How about bringing baskets of money – millions and millions of dollars – and handing it out? I wanna know, who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”

This isn’t the first time he’s gone down this road, either.

“They were going through Afghanistan paying off, I want to know who were the soldiers that are carrying cash of 50 million dollars? Cash! How stupid are we?” he said at a September rally. “I wouldn’t be surprised those soldiers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cash didn’t get there, I have to be honest.”

His spokewoman, the impeccably-named Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), said that he was referring to Iraqi soldiers stealing the money, a rare case of cover-your-ass by the campaign, because this seems to be the one area in which he fears to tread. Accusing our boys and girls of being thieves? That’s suicide. But he clearly didn’t mean Iraqis. One, they weren’t given the bags full of money, and two, well:

“More than 100 enlisted military personnel have been convicted of stealing funds, bribery, and contract rigging while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity valued at $52 million in a 2015 report.”

So, yeah- Trump was right. Maybe exaggerating, certainly a wild conspiratorialist, imagining these veterans living large and laughing at us simps, but still, this did happen. And more so, it points to the insanity of these wars, the incredible waste of money (and of course lives, and honor, and any possibility of even weak regional stability, but let’s stick with money). We spent close to two trillion dollars in Iraq, a lot of it to crooked contractors who inflated prices building a simulacrum of safe areas in the Green Zone. We rented out war priorities to mercenaries. We relentlessly bribed leaders who could turn on us the next day without more bribes.

And that’s why this is the third rail. We can talk about the war in Iraq being a “mistake”, and most of the country is in agreement, but getting into why it was a mistake is dangerous ground. We never talk about the outsourcing of fighting, and we never talk about how the war was driven by money, but paid for in blood. (Here I don’t mean that Bush went to war to make money for his friends, but it was an inevitable outcome of bad intentions).  It was cheap and tacky and cruel, and there is no doubt that its cheap and tacky and cruel nature influenced people who were there, these little pieces flung around with bags of money. Why can’t they have a taste? Everyone else is.

To look at why there was so much corruption is to understand that everywhere our economic system touches becomes just as corrupt. So we gasp when someone insinuates such a thing about the military, whom we’ve mostly all agreed to never criticize. That’s partly understandable, of course, but also dangerous. Not just because it excuses when they do something wrong, but to admit that the military, our boys and girls in uniform, can be corrupted is to look at the whole system in a bare and unflattering hanging-bulb light.

So it is weird that Donald Trump, who never met a lie he didn’t like, and vigorously defend even when every fact in opposition is thrust in his face, accidentally stumbles on to a truth. It’s even more telling that this is the one in which he immediately backtracks.

 

06.14.16
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Just a Normal Day on The Campaign Trail

Donald Trump

Let’s look at what happened in the 24 hours following the Orlando shooting.

  • Donald Trump gave a speech proposing a ban for immigrants from any Muslim country, and any country that has ever committed terrorism against the US and its allies (Ireland?), because, if you follow the logic of it, their children, or their children’s children might do something bad.
  • He suggested, to multiple outlets, that President Obama might in fact be in league with ISIS, or at least sympathetic to it. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.” Now, in his lying way, he said that he believes Obama just doesn’t get it, but you know, people might think otherwise, and it’s really unbelievable, and it’s also hard to believe. To recap: a Presidential candidate is repeating, and heightening, the idea that the sitting President is actively helping, or at least hoping for, and ISIS victory.
  • When a major publication called him out on it, he revoked their credentials. Nixon didn’t revoke the credentials of the Post during Watergate. Nixon! And they aren’t the first. “Among the news organizations whose reporters have been blacklisted: Gawker, BuzzFeed, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.” That these bans are haphazardly enforced doesn’t make them any less scary.

To recap: this is not normal. The blood-and-soil race-hatred, the wild paranoia, the fiercely shouted conspiracy theories, the dismissing of noncompliant press. There is no way to normalize this. This is not a campaign strategy. It’s exactly how he’d govern, as the tinpot strongman of our nightmares.

I actually think the Post thing will backfire, as the mainstream media, who have been desperate to  treat this as a normal race, albeit one with an unusual candidate, will finally see it happening to one of their own. It was easy when it was local papers like the Union-Leader or the Register. And what’s this BuzzFed? And didn’t Gawker do the Hogan? Mother Jones? Fuck you.

But it’s different with the Post. As much as it has fallen, it is still the Post, the paper that brought down Nixon. I hope that this is when they realize that telling both sides and covering the debate is enabling an authoritarian the likes of which this country has never seen. I worry, and will worry until proven wrong, that the press will self-censor so they can stay in bed with the campaign. Access! That’s what most tyrants want. Self-censorship out of fear and preservation is so much more effective than having to line people up against the wall. Voices that are compliant in their own silence are usually too ashamed to ever speak up. That’s what Trump wants.

But maybe this will be different. Maybe this is so outrageous that they’ll push back. Maybe they’ll be fully awakened to the danger of this American monster.

06.09.16
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Trump Grows Up! Again! Why You Shouldn’t Be Worried (And Also Be Very Worried)

In Talking Points Memo EdBlog this morning, John Judis outlines why Trump’s victory speech the other night could be cause for worry for Democrats. In it, Judis talked about  how Trump was reaching toward a less-racially tinged populism which could peel off enough white voters to have some kind of winning collation, or at least message. Judis certainly admits that it is probably too late for Trump to change his basic image, because his “incendiary racist, nativist, psycho-sexual and self-promotional provocations” are not the heart of his campaign, but the heart of who he is.

Still, though, the “Trump gives grown up speech” got some play the other day, for the umpteenth time. He used a teleprompter! He didn’t  spittle out “Mexican” as a pejorative! Is he finally pivoting?

Luckily, thankfully, this kind of nonsense didn’t get much traction. Everyone seems to understand that this was, despite Trump’s protestations to the contrary, the real act. His bombastic racist jackass routine is the real Trump, and his saying that he “can be so Presidential your head will spin” is just part of the act. But say he did start acting more like this on a daily basis (which he can’t, but pretend). Should we worry?

I say no, and here’s why.

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Image from ThinkProgress

Trump has built up his active base (though not all his voters) out of the dumbest, meanest, pastiest juvenile psychopaths filling alt-right message boards and hideous 4chan threads in the country. ThinkProgess has been doing a great job highlighting the racial hatred and misogynistic vitriol he’s unleashing and giving voice to, especially on college campuses. He’s empowering these awful people, these sniggering “anti-PC” cowards, who feel that the voice of white men is being buried under trigger warnings and safe spaces, and now feel like it is an act of courage, and revolutionary radicalism to say things that would have been acceptable in corporate boardrooms 40 years ago.

So even if Trump somehow moderates his rhetoric, his disgusting movement, the human and political equivalent of the Boston molasses disaster, a tidal wave of bitter and choking sludge, will fill in the gaps. These people will get louder as the summer moves on. Especially is he tones it down. There is a tribal connection, and they’ll think the boss is winking at them, playing the game so that he can get in power. They’ll pick up his slack. That’s why you shouldn’t worry about Trump being able to change his image too much. These are the people who will help sustain that.

Of course, while I still don’t think he can win, it is also why you should be worried on the very off-chance he does. And even if he loses, even if it is a historical nut-stomping that will make him history’s greatest loser, these forces he’s unleashed will be with us a long time.

06.07.16
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It’s Different Now: What Buzzfeed Gets About 2016

Ullrich has strong feelings about the way Hitler came to power in January 1933, enthroned by a ‘sinister plot’ of stupid elite politicians just at the moment when the Nazis were at last losing strength. It didn’t have to happen. He constantly reminds his readers that Hitler didn’t reach the chancellorship by his own efforts, but was put there by supercilious idiots who assumed they could manage this vulgarian. ‘We engaged him for our ends,’ said the despicable Franz von Papen. A year later, in the Night of the Long Knives, von Papen was grovelling to save his own neck.

Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books, June 2nd 2016

“What protects us in this country against big mistakes being made is the structure, the Constitution, the institutions,” McConnell told CBS News last month. “No matter how unusual a personality may be who gets elected to office, there are constraints in this country. You don’t get to do anything you want to.”

via Talking Points Memo

Neal Ascherson, the Scottish travel writer, wrote The Black Sea, which is my favorite kind of history book. It shows the long scope, how areas change slowly (and then very quickly) through migration, demographics, and the slow glacial push of cultural shifts becoming norms, and of violent revolutions mutating slowly into evolutions. It’s the long view of history, the kind that understands there aren’t black lines dividing epochs and periods, much in the same way that Masters of Empire explores how native culture didn’t hit a quick reboot when the Europeans arrived, and that understands (as we’ve argued) that the misery of Syria is part of the long night of Ottoman dissolution.

We tend, in this country at least, to see history as buried, and something that doesn’t impact us. It’s sort of the national myth, and it relies heavily on cognitive dissonance, since it is clear that our major issues still spring from the legacy of slavery and the historical memory and political divide of the Civil War. But we admire amnesia, and always look forward. This was accelerated by the 24-hr news cycle, and made manifest in the 24-second news cycle. When discussing yesterday’s tweets marks bloggers such as this one as hopelessly behind the times, understanding how we got to this point is an exercise in futility.

This isn’t just a little rant either; a lack of historical knowledge of American political trends has helped lead to the rise of the first openly white nationalist campaign we’ve seen in modern times. The elite media, and most of the non-elite, failed to understand how 40 years of Reaganite nonsense, 60 years of conservative takeover, and 150 years of post-Civil War resentment could factor into today’s election, and help facilitate the rise of Donald Trump. We live in the immediate present, which is where a man as completely removed from the truth as Trump thrives, and why he has, until the last week, managed to get away with whatever he wanted. It’s in this eternal present that it was believed that a man like Donald Trump couldn’t win simply because he was a man like Donald Trump. This is an ahistoric tautology, in the literal sense, because it ignores the factors that enabled his victory. It was obvious in August that he was appealing to the most violent lizard part of a broken party, one torn apart by geographic and demographic pressures. But he was still treated like a joke.

Now, as he shatters all norms, threatening to “look into” judges and to jail his likely opponent should he win (a statement that should be breathtaking, but barely makes noise), we wonder how we got here, and how we should react. It’s why it is interesting that Buzzfeed, who has generally symbolized the memory-free nonsense of the internet, has broken ties with the RNC over Trump’s nomination. (It should be noted that over the last 5 years BuzzFeed has created some excellent journalism, but its reputation is still that of the constant present, a man seeing the sunrise every morning and wondering what he could possibly be seeing.)

BuzzFeed, which accepts ads from GOP and Democratic candidates, had a $1.3 million ad deal with the RNC, but cancelled it, because Trump is beyond the pale. In a statement, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said:

The tone and substance of his campaign are unique in the history of modern US politics. Trump advocates banning Muslims from traveling to the United States, he’s threatened to limit the free press, and made offensive statements toward women, immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and foreign nationals.

(cont)

We don’t need to and do not expect to agree with the positions or values of all our advertisers. And as you know, there is a wall between our business and editorial operations. This decision to cancel this ad buy will have no influence on our continuing coverage of the campaign.

We certainly don’t like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company. However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don’t run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won’t accept Trump ads for the exact same reason.

This is a big deal. This is exactly how the media should be covering Trump. We’ve never had anything like this in our modern history, and he shouldn’t be treated as just another nominee, albeit a flamboyant one. We’re at a hinge in our country’s history. It could go either way.

I began this piece with a few quotes, one from a book review about how Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by old-guard politicians who assumed they could let him ride popular anger into office but then control him for their ends, and one by Mitch McConnell, who represents Republicans who think the same thing about Trump. The thrust of the TPM article is that the old guard’s main pledge is that sure, Trump might be an authoritarian monster, but once he’s in office we’ll be able to control him.

This isn’t to say that Trump is Hitler. This isn’t Germany in 1933. It’s the United States in 2016, a country that isn’t sure of itself, feels like its best days are behind, and is sliding along a weird trail of economic dislocation and historical amnesia. That’s bad enough, and it can get much worse. That we have even gotten to this point shows how much worse it can get. Not understanding how we got here, and ignoring everything except tomorrow’s news, creates the possibility to slip past the point of no return.

05.26.16
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Thiel and Speech

Yesterday, I was a bit flippant about Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, mostly because, while I love a lot of the sites like Deadspin and Gizmodo and IO9, Nick Denton is distasteful and outing private citizens for clicks means that the end is pretty deserved. But as Thiel revealed his long game to destroy a media company he (justifiably, since it outed him in 2007) hated, it became clear that this was more than a billionaire vendetta, which is terrifying enough. It’s the blueprint for the destruction of an independent press.

Felix Salmon smartly lays out the dangers in an essay for Fusion.

It gets worse. If Thiel’s strategy works against Gawker, it could be used by any billionaire against any media organization. Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, the list goes on and on. Up until now, they’ve mostly been content suing news organizations as plaintiffs, over stories which name them. But Thiel has shown them how to go thermonuclear: bankroll other lawsuits, as many as it takes, and bankrupt the news organization that way. Very few companies have the legal wherewithal to withstand such a barrage.

This is scary because there is no recourse. We all like to laugh when idiots say that their 1st Amendment rights are being stolen because a private company takes down their racist comment on a message board. At this point, on the internet, there are more jackasses ready to pounce on the misconception of what “Freedom of Speech” means than there are people doing the misconcepting. And in a way, that’s what is brilliant about Thiel’s plot. It’s perfectly legal and constitutional, so long as he can find enough cases.

That’s what makes it so terrifying. If a billionaire can come up with enough cases that are plausible enough to not get thrown out, any media company can be bankrupted defending themselves. Unlike with 1st Amendment cases, there is no legal or constitutional recourse. And so what will most likely happen is that media companies won’t want to pay for these lawsuits, so the choice is to fold, or to self-censor.

In every authoritarian country, self-censorship is the more insidious form of silencing. It’s not like totalitarian countries, where there were clear lines. In these semi-states, it isn’t always clear what will get you in trouble. You fear for your life or livelihood, and so don’t go near issues that skirt the danger zone. Then the skirt gets pushed back further and further, and eventually, you don’t even think twice about your silence. It becomes second nature. We have that for national security, here, which is bad and dangerous enough, but not for much else.

Well, Thiel has shown how the monied will be able to impose self-censorship on anyone who wants to continue making money producing content. And if that sounds sterile, it is. If it gets to the point where journalism that offends anyone rich and powerful becomes financially impossible, all we’ll have is content, a set of listicles stomping on the human throat, forever. That this comes against Gawker makes it seem like just desserts. It isn’t. It is, in fact, part and parcel of the Rule of Money, and if we elect a billionaire who has made silencing the press an open part of his platform, the transformation could be complete.

(Update: initial version said “in every totalitarian country” in first sentence of penultimate paragraph, but that wasn’t accurate. Clarifications added)

05.25.16
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2016

 

Please? Image from Melencholia

 

So, it turns out that billionaire libertarian Trump-supporting James O’Keefe-loving prick Peter Thiel was bankrolling the Hulk Hogan-Gawker trial, in which Hogan was taped during what he thought was a private conversation saying terrible racist things (while having sex with his best friend’s wife). Thiel is using his money to destroy a media company that he doesn’t like, because the media company, who thinks that anything involving a famous person is news, outed him in 2007.

Hogan’s “best friend”, by the way, is “Tampa-area radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem”, who you know is just the worst.

This is one of those cases where you have a sliver of sympathy for everyone (except Bubba the Love Sponge), but they are also all reprehensible, and you pretty much just wish the sun would explode.

05.24.16
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Trump and Hillary Poll Numbers: The Bernie Argument

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If Bernie won, you’d be seeing this guy on a lot more GOP ads.

One more political quick hit, and that’s it, I promise.

It’s true that, for the moment, Bernie matches up more favorably against Trump, and has a much higher personal approval rating than does Hillary. I don’t think that would ever change. He genuinely seems likable (though that might be changing a bit), and Hillary has always had problems, partly due to her, largely due to other factors (such as lies, innuendo, and an idiot press). I can’t imagine a scenario where Bernie is less liked than Hillary Clinton.

That said, these numbers, which Sanders supporters use to say he should be the nominee (as opposed to millions of actual voters), don’t take one thing into account: namely, the right wing media has, since Clinton became inevitable, praised Bernie at her expense, and stopped criticizing him. If Sanders was actually winning, and had a shot, you’d hear the word “socialism” 400 times a day. They’d be conflating it with Communism, and calling him “comrade”, and talking about how “it isn’t a coincidence that his rise comes on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, and is that what we really want?”, and I promise that you wouldn’t be able to drive through three consecutive counties in this great nation of ours without seeing his face and Stalin’s on the same billboard. If you can’t picture Trump going around saying “Listen, ok, no one knows history better than Trump, and communism was really bad, ok?” then you have a tragic lack of political imagination.

Socialism, thankfully, isn’t as much a poison word for people who grew up after the Cold War. But it still has an emotional sway with millions and millions of people, and if Sanders was the nominee, that’s all you’d be hearing. I don’t know if that would sink him, since he’d also get more airtime to explain himself, and why socialism is not un-American, but a genuine part, the best part, of our economic and cultural heritage. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that polling numbers would be the same if he was closer to the nomination, and the target of the same kind of smear campaign Hillary has been under for 30 years.

05.24.16
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The Ken Starr Times Puffery and The Normalization of the Paranoid

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Remember: this guy was super gross. Image from NYMag

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That having been said, the idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully” in Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency, he continued…

If there is a bigger weasel phrase in history than “tragic dimensions which we all lament”, I don’t think I’ve heard it.

The Times this morning ran a piece on Ken Starr, the sex-obsessed maniac whose pursuit of Bill Clinton helped turn the 90s into the sordid and greasy decade that it was, in an attempt to show that age has mellowed him to the point where he can depersonalize the very recent past. It was also a clinic in the way that scandal, especially that regarding the Clintons, becomes normalized, and how nonsense phrases that mean nothing become a sort of shorthand for the initiated, and a vague synecdoche for everyone else. This isn’t history, either. It’s obviously directly relevant to this year’s campaign.

Continue reading →

05.18.16
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Legacy And Language: Politico vs. Tim Noah

Timothy Noah had a typically sharp article this morning in Politico about the Obama administration implementing new rules that help promote a progressive policy, the most important being the new overtime wage rule, which guarantees the dangerous and un-American notion that people should be paid for the work they do.

The reason there is a rush of rules is due, as Noah explains, to a regulation passed in 1996 by Newt’s Congress. Per Noah:

Blame the Congressional Review Act. Enacted by a newly Republican Congress in 1996 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, the CRA law gave Congress 60 legislative days after a regulation was issued to block it by using an expedited procedure.

…

Aimed at taming the regulatory leviathan, the law proved almost entirely ineffective because presidents could — and did — routinely veto resolutions of disapproval against their own agencies’ rules. But under one circumstance, the CRA could be deadly. Late in a president’s final year, 60 legislative days (which extend much longer than calendar days) could carry over into another administration. A new president of the opposite party would be tempted to squelch a predecessor’s pet project.

Now, since then, there have only been two changes of administration: Clinton to Bush and Bush to Obama, so this is still new. Geroge W. Bush knew to protect himself. He was the first President to use the law, overturning a late-term Clinton regulation that instituted ergonomic standards to protect workers against the crippling problems of repetitive stress. It’s important to remember that Bush wasn’t a hapless doof thrust into global chaos; he was an evil boneheaded dork who ran a cruel administration from the jump.

Regardless, he understood the rules, and so did the same thing that President Obama is doing now. As Noah said, Obama is actually behind the Bush pace for pushing rules. Obviously, that means he’s a tyrant, because nothing that happened before Obama was elected counts, but that’s not really the point. I’m interested in Politico here.

I don’t know if Noah writes his own headlines. But the headline here is at clickbaity and incendiary odds with the rest of the piece: “Obama Rushes Out Rules To Guarantee Legacy.” To be fair, Noah’s first sentence includes the weighted and misleading phrase “shoveling out regulations nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three”, mentions the cost to business, and has a GOP congressman talk of a “regulatory onslaught” before any explanation, but the rest is sober and measured and comprehensive.

So a lot of this is on Politic, though some on Noah. If you read the headline, and skimmed the beginning, you’d think this was some kind of dastardly new scheme. “Rushing out rules” and “shoveling” at a clip nearly 1/3rd faster (which isn’t that much faster if you think about it- I don’t know how much heavy lifting “nearly” does there). It’s dramatic, and makes the continuation of the job he was elected to do seem nefarious.

But it’s the word “legacy” that really sticks. Journalists, especially of the Politico ilk, love to do this. The Climate Change accord was Obama shoring up his environmental legacy. The deal with Iran was his foreign policy legacy. Now, Presidents, as are people who aren’t in history books, are concerned with how they’ll be remembered. There’s no doubt about that. But the quest for a”legacy” is really them doing the job they were elected to do. The Climate Change and the Iran Accord were smart policy: progressive and important and a chance to make the world a better, more livable, and more peaceful place. Even if you disagree, this was policy. It was policy he was elected to enact.

But to Politico, all is artifice. The actions don’t matter; just the perception. It’s a TV show and a ratings grab, a garish tent of fools. It’s not just that they paint these pictures. They assume everyone is acting in equally bad faith, and that makes it easy for us to believe they are. It’s both cynical and credulous, and misses the point in every way.

Politico’s  main sin isn’t that it is a suck-up fest of conservative 3rd-wayism or that it is as shallow as it is insipid (writers like Noah notwithstanding). It’s that it wants you to be as dumb as it is. It believes that you want it. It degrades anything that is real because it can’t understand how someone can look beyond tomorrow’s headline. That’s the main reason Obama has always confounded them. He refuses to see the world in the same blinkered and pointless way that they do.