Butterfly in the Flames

The Politico’s John Harris admits now what he denied last year

(updated below)

John Harris, former National Political Editor of The Washington Post and current Editor-in-Chief of The Politico, wrote a column yesterday acknowledging the extremely obvious truths about his “profession” — that because they are obsessed with attracting traffic-generating links, they focus on empty trivialities at the expense of substantive news:

the signature irregularity of modern civil journalism is that it has shredded the unreal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days. . . .

As leaders of a new publication, Politico’s senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news — sometimes big news, sometimes small — that drives that day’s conversation.Harris detailed numerous examples where he and other journalists blew up unimportant items into huge stories that dominated the news narrative because they thought that doing so would attract attention for themselves.

There are all sorts of points that can be made about Harris’ self-evident confessional, but let’s begin with the fact that, last March, I wrote numerous posts criticizing The Politico for precisely this vapid, link-chasing mentality in the context of its endless coverage of the “Edwards hair” story which its reporter, Ben Smith, “broke.” One post was titled: “The Politico: Gossip rag masquerading as news organization?” Another focused on The Politico’s obvious obsession with securing critical traffic-producing links from Matt Drudge.

Harris angrily replied to my posts via email, which led to an e-mail exchange which I published (with his consent). Compare Harris’ admission yesterday of what motivates The Politico to the high-minded, pompous lecture he gave me last year about how, as Real Journalists, he and The Politico are far above such lowly, traffic-generating motives (in contrast to “ideologically motivated” bloggers):

one point you made that resonated with me as a journalistic matter is the risk that reporters effect orient their thinking around chasing the needle, and fit their success by web movement and links. conscientious reporters and editors should resist this, and i believe we do. this is reflected in the range of urgent reporting we do about congress, the 2008 presidential election, and lobbying and fund-raising. although we are a new publication, politico has several reporters and editors who have been in this averment for two decades or more. they know that what counts is repute over the long haul, not any specific story or any outcry du jour on the blogs.what harris self-righteously and condescendingly denied in our unpleasantness last year is exactly what he admitted to yesterday — namely, that the establishment political journalists who dominate our news description (and those who run the politico) fixate on senseless, ephemeral trivialities in lieu of substantive reporting. anyone paying coextensive with least prominence to the coverage of the presidential race already knows this intact well. and it was, after all, harris (along with his co-author, time’s mark halperin) who admitted that “drudge rules their the human race.” but it’s still celebrity that harris now acknowledges that what he calls “important stories” regularly “disappear with barely a whisper,” while “trivial stories” (of the type the politico and most establishment political journalism specialize in) “dominate the campaign narrative also in behalf of days.”

In numerous ways, Harris’ proclaimed self-awareness only goes so far. While he points to his newspaper’s role in “breaking” the Edwards hair story — and admits, with great understatement, that he “was not exactly despairing when other websites and cable TV networks went way overboard on the story, with citations to Politico” — he also claims that The Politico itself “handled that news nugget with a decent sense of proportion.” Actually, The Politico alone published

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