As even occasional readers here well know, we have a special and growing disconnect at the NYT. Simply put many of the Times' vaunted Washington and national reporters seem incapable of seeing the forest because of all the trees in the way. Or, to use a different metaphor, they cannot bring themselves to report that the emperor and his minions have no clothes.
Brad DeLong was so distressed by the distortions in Elisabeth Bumiller's 300-word piece today that he called her: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Special Richard Cheney "Opinions About Shape of Earth Differ" Issue).
DeLong's conclusion: "Her replies seemed, to put it politely, incoherent." And DeLong identifies the structural problem:
Now, of course, the important thing is that Bumiller is far from being alone: White House journalists go native, lose all sense of context, and pull their punches on administrations regularly, and on this administration much more than most. I at least have known about this problem since 1982, when William Greider published his book The Education of David Stockman and made it crystal clear just how much he had pulled his punches while he was on the daily White House covering beat. It's a structural problem, it's a serious problem, and it makes a substantial part of the morning print news useless.
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