A Bad Week For The Politico

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/26/bad-week-politico/

A Bad Week For The Politico

Politico’s Roger Simon covers Saturday’s CAP/SEIU presidential health care forum with the headline, “More Than You Wanted to Know About Health Care.” His lede:

Because you did not want to spend your Saturday sitting in a room for three hours listening to Democratic presidential candidates tell you how they are going to provide universal health care for America, Politico did it for you.

Simon may be bored by health care, but the American public isn’t (especially the 47 million who don’t have health insurance). A recent NBC/WSJ poll finds that Americans rank health care just below the war in Iraq as the “highest priority” for the federal government to address. Eighty percent believe it is an extremely or very important issue that Congress and the President need to deal with.

Simon’s insights top off what was a very bad week for the Politico. A round-up:

Politico (Tuesday): “Republican sources also disclosed that it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, whose incomplete and inaccurate congressional testimony about the prosecutors helped precipitate the crisis, will also resign shortly.”

FACT: McNulty has not yet resigned.

Politico (Thursday): “John Edwards is suspending his campaign for President, and may drop out completely, because his wife has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that sickened her in 2004.”

FACT: “Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, seeking to overcome doubts he can stay focused while his wife undergoes treatment for an incurable cancer, said on Saturday he will campaign until the very end. ‘I’m definitely in the race for the duration,’ he said.”

Politico (Friday): “The Politico will be co-hosting a debate among the major Republican presidential candidates on May 3 in Simi Valley, Calif., where for the first time citizens will be able to submit real-time questions for the candidates via politico.com.” (Press Release)

FACT: On Saturday, March 24, citizens were able to submit real-time questions for the candidates via ThinkProgress.org.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove once speculated that Politico “would prompt regional papers to dismantle their Washington bureaus.” Reporting that’s wrong won’t have that effect.

To the people who brought us slow-bleed: We wish you better luck in your reporting this week.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. the Anti-politico = the REAL TRUTH.

damn, that is funny.

[kevinmc]

2. I was wondering ....

when others would notice that Politico's track record is lousy. I was hoping that they would be a good source for news. CBS News spouting that they use them doesn't do their crediblity any good either. I am putting them in the Capitol Hill Blue category for now.

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. The minute Bush gave them a free commercial during one of his press conferences

it was clear that Politico was designed as a right wing attempt to counter the fast growing, uncontrolled influence of blogs and places like DU.

I would offer that Politico should be read with a high dgree of skepticism.

[annabanana]

4. They STILL don't "get it". . . It's either funny in a sad way

or sad in a funny way..

They just can't seem to wrap their heads around a "from the bottom up" dynamic. If they can't pronounce from on high, they aren't whole in some way.

[grasswire]

5. these are Beltway insiders

Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhigh, Roger Simon, yada yada. They don't understand the blogosphere culture and how it gets news. Dan Froomkin gets it. These guys don't.

[Kber]

6. The Politico site is proof that the value of the blogosphere

isn't in the format, it's in the content.

[The Count]

8. Bingo! You said it in a nutshell! It's not the medium we are tired of, it's the lies

and the spin.

[Elidor]

7. Drudge and the Politico -- poisonously joined at the hip

The new online political magazine, The Politico, is a pernicious new presence in our media landscape. As I noted the other day, it really is nothing more than the Drudge Report dressed up with the trappings of mainstream media credibility. Today, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes on his blog about what is merely the latest episode (of many) proving how closely coordinated The Politico is with The Drudge Report. It is not hyperbole to say that the former is all but an arm of the latter.

As I noted earlier this week, The Politico has instantaneously become one of the most-linked sites (I would guess the single most-linked) on The Drudge Report. Drudge links produce a volume of traffic unlike any other. Central to the business and political plan of The Politico is, quite transparently, overt courting of Matt Drudge and active cooperation with him.

(SNIP)
Allen, who was Time's White House correspondent before joining The Politico, has a relationship with the White House and with George Bush so affable that the President actually went out of his way at a recent Press Conference deliberately to plug The Politico while exchanging in giggly chatter with Allen. While at Time, Allen was typically in the forefront of the most predictable, petty and baseless Beltway smears. As but one amazing example, The Politico this week published an article -- precisely echoing Matt Drudge's headlined theme that the House was in "disarray" -- proclaiming in the first sentence that "Nancy Pelosi's honeymoon is over."

That is an almost verbatim copy of the theme Allen was pushing months ago at Time, merely a few days after the midterm election, before Pelosi was even inaugurated as Speaker

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/27/politico/index.html