Same Song, New Tempo from Politico

A few months ago, Politico announced an aggressive move into “long-form journalism,” that great mystical chimera of the magazine editor’s imagination: an animal often hunted, but rarely sighted.

For people familiar with the site’s editorial formula—quick hits, shallow obsession with political celebrity, cheap click-baiting, and who’s up/who’s down high school journalism, the question that followed this move was obvious. Could Politico transform their glib approach to political news?

Politico went deep last week, with its new magazine’s cover story on the state of the president’s cabinet, but all the hallmarks of its style are still there. There’s a “pecking order” with “celebrity power players” at the top, and there are still a bunch of vaguely referenced pissants who do useless things like running the Department of Commerce.

The U.S. government contemplates an attack on Syria, and the president decides not to rain down death on other human beings—well, at least not for now, and not without authorization from Congress, that quaint old relic of indirect power. Politico goes straight to the important question: whose power got juiced, and whose power got iced?

Long-forming it up, senior staff writer Glenn Thrush asks the White House chief of staff if the secretary of defense and secretary of state were in the Oval Office when the president announced his decision. It turns out that they were not, and no story about Bieber or Gaga would have put the rest any differently. Secretary of state John Kerry was “stung” by the “snub,” which made him look like a total A-list outsider. Does he even get to see the president backstage? Do they share limos? Does Kerry get to visit the cottage at the Chateau Marmont?

Not present in the story on the bombing of Syria: Syrians. Total outsiders. Can’t even get their calls returned. Not A-list material at all. Ditto the outer entourage types who would have done the actual bombing. Did those people even have any power to toss into the pot?

And then there’s Politico’s reliable ability to muddle cause and effect. The Glenn Greenwald rule for explanatory journalism is that you can understand most news stories by replacing variations on “despite” with “because of,” and it’s still the most useful thing you can remember as you read establishment journalism. Here’s Politico last week, explaining that the cabinet was a shitty place to be back in the Clinton years, and has gotten shittier since:

Two presidents later, the Cabinet is a swarm of 23 people that includes 15 secretaries and eight other Cabinet-rank officers. And yet never has the job of Cabinet secretary seemed smaller.

Despite the fact that denizens of the cabinet vanish into a growing “swarm,” the job increasingly lacks stature. Washington journalism explains the world for you—leaving you, as always, a little dumber for having taken the explanation, as if a dentist snuck up and injected Novocaine directly into your mind while you read.

Politico’s long-form journalism presents a new challenge for readers—there’s so much more to have to ignore.