This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

As the introduction to this blog states, I am a former newspaper reporter, so I it is natural for me to spend time considering how reporters these days could go about their business in better ways.  Especially those who write about politics.

Two commentators in the Washington Post – columnists Jennifer Rubin and Perry Bacon – dealt with this issue in what they wrote a couple days ago.

Here are excerpts of what they suggested.

FROM JENNIFER RUBIN

“My dim view of polling a year out from the election is no secret.  To illustrate the foolishness of building punditry around meaningless, premature polling, consider what would unfold if pundits ran with a spate of recent polling in President Biden’s favor.

“Political reporters are so used to this flawed approach to campaign coverage that many might be stumped if you told them they could not base their reporting on any polling this far out.

“But what would we say?!  As media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen is found of saying, they would need to cover “not the odds but the stakes.”

“In other words, the mainstream media would have to focus (not just for a single story but extended over weeks) on the consequences of electing a candidate echoing Adolf Hitler and vowing to use the military and Justice Department against his enemies.

“They would have to look not at polling about the economy but the actual economic record of the Administration (e.g., inflation flattened, more than 14 million jobs created, record low unemployment for Black people, Hispanics and women).  They would need to examine the decisions of Trump-appointed judges and the social uproar it set off, especially among women in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“In sum, the electorate would be much better served if the punditocracy and political reporting dispensed with horse race and analysis.  Our democracy might depend on it”.

COMMENT:  Good ideas.  Especially the point about meaningless stories about polling when, (a) when potential respondents don’t want to respond; (b) when respondents don’t answer honestly; and (c) when the election is so far off that regular people don’t care.

Doing with Rubin advocates would require extra effort, honest imagination, and hard work, given what is at stake in this country – as Rubin writes, “the consequences of electing a candidate echoing Adolf Hitler and vowing to use the military and Justice Department against his enemies.”

FROM PERRY BACON

Political journalism is in crisis. Over the past few months, BuzzFeed News, FiveThirtyEight, Vice and a number of other outlets that specialize in political news have substantially cut staffing and coverage. Even CNN and The Post have laid off journalists. And the political media is struggling to cover an increasingly radical Republican Party without seeming to be on the side of the Democrats.

“Political journalism is in crisis.  Over the past few months, BuzzFeed News, FiveThirtyEight, Vice and a number of other outlets that specialize in political news have substantially cut staffing and coverage.  Even CNN and The Post have laid off journalists.  

“And the political media is struggling to cover an increasingly radical Republican Party without seeming to be on the side of the Democrats.

“But there is good news, too.  Several new or expanding outlets are addressing some of political journalism’s long-standing shortcomings:  Insufficient coverage of state and local government and of people who aren’t White and upper-income; an over-prioritization of elections over policy; a failure to recognize that the courts are a central front in today’s political conflicts.

“And this matters.  I don’t care about the state of political journalism just because it’s my field.  The coverage decisions and priorities of news outlets affect the behavior of elected officials and the lives of everyday citizens.  Good political journalism is vital.”

Bacon lists seven outlets he says are re-imagining political journalism in smart ways.

• The American Prospect/If you want to understand what’s happening inside the Biden Administration and the broader Democrat Party, the Prospect is a must-read.  The magazine focuses on policy, not elections.

• Balls and Strikes/Until recently, many news outlets treated the judiciary, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, as a high-minded institution not caught up in the partisan battles dividing the rest of the country.  But there has been a push to tell a different, more accurate story:  The judiciary is partisan and political, too.  And the Republican Party, in particular, has stacked the courts with appointees who carry out its policy goals. 

Balls and Strikes, which is an arm of the progressive group Demand Justice, most embodies this style.

• Bolts/When there is a high-profile incident involving race or the police, the news media tends to descend on a given city for weeks, write a lot of stories and then move on.  Not Bolts.  The magazine recognizes that voting rights, gerrymandering, policing, and other issues that often play out at the state and local level are increasingly at the center of American politics.

A recent Bolts story not only explained how Atlanta police have arrested protesters who object to a massive police training facility being built there, but described similar actions being taken against activists across the country.

• The Guardian US/The U.S. edition of the London-based Guardian is one of the few outlets that does these three things at once:  Covers up-to-minute news like the New York Times or The Post; openly acknowledges its left of center ideology; writes about politics without the “insider” approach (unnamed sources, an obsession with consultants and strategy) that makes so much political coverage hard to parse if you aren’t already an expert.

• Hammer & Hope/This magazine was created by some activists and intellectuals who have been at the center of the Black Lives Matter movement.  So, Hammer & Hope takes it as a given that anti-Black discrimination still exists in America and concentrates on what should be done to address it.

• Popular Information/Neither the grocer Kroger nor the restaurant chain Olive Garden was offering all of its employees paid sick leave during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic.  Many companies have broken their promises not to donate to Republican members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election results.  

Cameron Sexton, the GOP speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, purchased a house in Nashville through a trust, perhaps trying to obscure that he and his family may functionally live in Music City, not Sexton’s home district about two hours away. 

Those are all stories that were extensively covered by other media outlets, but were first broken by Popular Information.

• States Newsroom/Local newspapers are shrinking, and most national media outlets mostly cover Congress and the president.  That has left a huge and important void as both parties increasingly enact their policy agendas at the state level.

Enter States Newsroom. Over the past six years, the company has founded news outlets focused on state government in 34 states.  They are usually quite small, only four to five staffers and a handful of contributing writers.  But because so much is happening at the state level and there are so few reporters in most capitals, these operations are extremely valuable.   I subscribe to the newsletter for the Kentucky Lantern and read it every day.

Bacon concludes his analysis by saying:  “We need more political journalism, but we also need better political journalism.  And amid all the bad news about the news, that better political journalism is emerging.”

For me, that’s good news.