Joshua Holland: Why Our National Press Corps is Failing the Public!

It's hard to imagine a greater irony than our political press, obsessed as it is with process stories, dubiously sourced rumors and trivial fluff, lamenting the fact that we can't have a "serious national debate." Consider what may be the funniest lede in this cycle so far: "The elevated presidential campaign of ideas, fleetingly achieved after months of mudslinging, died Tuesday," wrote Reid Epstein. "It was three days old." Epstein went on to catalog all of the mean things the two campaigns were saying about each other, as if this is an election year or something. But what makes that so hilarious is that Epstein's  piece appeared in Politico exactly two days after the rag ran a piece titled "Forget the budget: Paul Ryan is hot!" and just two days before a penetrating analysis headlined, "Fit for office: Candidates in best shape ever." Politico is also slapping together a quickie e book about how the Obama campaign is "roiled in turmoil," which is just a campaign classic that never gets stale. We can't have serious debates in this country, because we don't have a news media that offers us serious debates. Rather than dig into the candidates' claims, we get he said, she said drivel, and doses of whatever conventional wisdom is flying around the Beltway. We get dueling campaign "narratives" rather than a serious look at issues of substance, which seem to bore most campaign reporters. That has long been the case, but we appear to have entered a new environment, one that Dave Roberts of Grist described as an era of "post truth politics" "a political culture in which politics, public opinion and media narratives have become almost entirely disconnected from policy, the substance of legislation." The Romney Ryan campaign appears to have embraced this reality, running a campaign that is unprecedented in its mendacity.