Why is there Politico?

So the New Yorker Festival is on, and if you were a reasonably educated person of the Upper East Side with nothing better to spend $35 on this morning you could go over to Florence Gould Hall before Bloomingdales opened and hear Ken Auletta interview Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times. So Politico sent their Media correspondent Hadas Gold there—don't know whether she had to get a ticket or not—to apparently think she was reporting a story about Abramson by writing down excerpts from the interview and posting them to Politico in the afternoon, as if she had done the interview herself. [jump]

Horse and jockey by Willard Mullin (1902-78), via CartoonSnap.

Abramson complained about Politico-type coverage of politics as horse race, trivializing the issues, and Auletta pointed out that the Times itself does some of that with its stable of handicappers and political color commentators and Maureen Dowd. No, I'm sure he didn't mention Dowd by name. Also,

In response to a question about a controversial POLITICO article on her leadership style, Abramson said she agrees that such critiques are part of what the Guardian’s Emily Bell described as a “wholly sexist narrative of women in power.” Abramson also cited Sheryl Sandberg and her writings on the correlations between women in power and likability.

No interest shown in responding to that (accurate) description of Politico on women. As far as I can tell the entire journalistic purpose of the piece is to show that Politico is really just like the Times, in that it publishes controversial articles (bold in original) while the Times publishes a bit of stuff that is almost as bad as Politico is throughout.

Meanwhile the other Media correspondent, young Dylan Byers, didn't even have to go outdoors.

Byers reports that that a forthcoming report was reported in Friday's Washington Post according to which the Obama White House is the most totally secretive White House ever: like, after David Sanger published a detailed account of the joint US-Iraeli cyberterror unleashed on Iran in 2012, White House staff and intelligence personnel were literally ordered not to talk to him any more! Just because they told him a bunch of secrets! As far as I can tell the entire journalistic purpose of this piece is to show that Politico is really just like the Post, in that it publishes more controversial articles as long as the Post does the reporting and publishes them first.

Anyway, if Politico really wants to be taken seriously, I'd be happy to give them some advice.

By Joseph, 6 (when the drawing was done),  for the Big Draw at Manchester  Art Gallery, Manchester, England, October 2005.