We're not sure we'd mean it, but we'd open it that way if we were working for POLITICO, a news outlet that, more and more, appears to have chosen "POLITICO" as its name only because someone mistakenly assumed HYPERBOLE was already taken.
That's how Joseph Williams can write a bad profile about middle of the pack (at best) Van Jones while raving that Jones is "a superstar of the resurgent left." And it's how he can begin a paragraph with "To his supporters, . . ." while never noting any nay-sayers. It's not journalism, kids, it's p.r. copy.
And it's not just Joseph Williams. Pick anyone at random. We went with Jennifer Epstein's hard-gushing "Obama's toughest critics: Obama." The man running the non-transparent administration, the one setting new records for secrecy, is hailed as a truth monger by Epstein who says his (unestablished in the article) pattern of (unestablished in the article) honesty has "establish[ed] the president as an honest, sympathetic figure heading into the 2012 election" -- and on and on she goes without ever once saying to whom Barack Obama's been established as that.
You don't establish, you don't source, not in p.r. copy. In p.r. copy, you just gush and gush endlessly. The lowliest DC hack is elevated to the stratosphere.
The subjects shouldn't feel flattered. Nora Ephron long ago established (in a piece for Esquire) what this sort of writing led to: expecations no profile subject could ever live up to.
And the press shouldn't feel proud. All that time and space used to churn out Rona Barrett's DC People could have instead gone to practicing journalism. Actually, that's not fair to Rona. She showed far more skepticism in one gossip report than POLITICO demonstrates in a full week.
