Politico has been derided as “Teen Beat on the Potomac,” a journalistic virus that has infected reporting by emphasizing controversy and gossip, with a splash of tabloid and less concern for hard news. And while Politico does churn out some decent reporting, its main claim to fame is Playbook, the daily tip sheet started by Mike Allen and now written by Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman, whose mission is to “drive the day” of political news coverage in the nation’s capital.
One part news aggregator and one part political analysis, Allen did not pioneer this idea, but he did perfect it; however, with his departure to Axios, and the emergence of other like products such as James Hohmann’s Daily 202 (The Washington Post), Playbook has faltered. A perfect example comes from today’s (May 16, 2017) edition. Palmer and Sherman offer this “quick thought”
You do get the sense that Trump has a decent chance for some sort of peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. Of course, we should all be skeptical of solving one of the most intractable cycles of tension and violence ever. But in the last few weeks, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has signaled openness, and behind the scenes, Trump officials - and even some longtime Obama officials - have been surprised at the positive body language on the two sides.
Here, in one paragraph is everything that is wrong with modern-day political journalism. A story that is thinly sourced (anonymous current/former Administration officials), whose main source of evidence (body language) is as reliable as phrenology, drawing a conclusion (decent chance) about one of the hardest foreign policy challenges of modern history (peace between the Israelis and Palestinians), written by two reporters who were not even born when Jimmy Carter helped broker the peace deal between Israel and Egypt.
It is no small feat to cram so much bad reporting into one paragraph, but Palmer and Sherman manage to do it. You would hope that an editor somewhere up the food chain at Politico would have had the good sense to squash a story like this, but in today’s media environment, that would be asking for way too much.
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