“This is the story of our political journalism. It’s like Hollywood journalism now. A lot can be traced back to when the press decided that its job was to find out who these people are as characters. And essentially that means catching them in lapses, contradictions, ignoring what fills the Theodore White presidential campaign books, which is issues and places. It didn’t seem like a genius idea to write about rural Virginia in doing a piece for The New Yorker on Obama’s first year. It seemed like, of course that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go to southern Virginia and see how it’s playing out in terms of works projects and people’s attitudes. But hardly anyone else did that. It shows that our political journalism has become kind of a hot house world. It’s a very powerful world. TV magnifies it in a big way, distorts it. But I think most political journalists have forgotten what politics is,” – George Packer.
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The Dish 