Mass Retirements? Not So Fast, Dems Say

Try defending the facts, not the press.

The facts have a better track record.

Shorter Christina: "Whoops! My previous post was bullshit. Time to cover my ass."

If you watch or read "All the Presidents' Men," most of the story is taken up by the efforts of Woodward and Bernstein to gather the most basic facts about the Committee to Reelect the President. Who was on it, where did the money come from. Stuff like that. They wore out shoe leather, worked the phones, cultivated second and third tier sources by the dozen, and had the occaisional clandestine meeting in a garage with their one high level, now famous, source. (When you watch the movie, it's amazing how obvious who it was when you listen to the kinds of things he knew). They even had another reporter doing a little flirting with an ex-boyfriend who worked for the RNC.

It took them weeks to find out stuff you'd get in about fifteen minutes on the Internet today. Maybe a few hours or a few days if you assume we had no post-Watergate disclosure laws, but did have an Internet and the reflexive tendency of the owners of sites to dump data into them.

But that's what reporters thought their job was in those days: gather facts, try to piece them together until it looked like they added up to a discernable story and report it.

It really makes me think the whole degeneration of journalism over the last three decades could be just this simple: in the old days, reporters valued facts because they were hard to come by. Nowadays, facts are easy to get, reporters think they're worthless.

The New York Times is making the same mistake today. This is their top story right now: Retirements in Senate Signal Tough Year for Democrats. Many people in the comments to the article are pointing out the innaccuracy of the premise.

I think some comments are going a bit far. The fact is the Democratic retirements have come in a short time, and they're more recent. That's bound to make news. The fact Democratic retirements are coming later might mean something. I doubt it's more than coincidence, but I can't prove it. We'll know if the retirements stop, and they'll be meaningless if Democrats lose fewer seats than expected.

And let's not forget that the appointed senators from Delaware and Illinois aren't running, so that's four seats democrats are voluntarily vacating. So I think Democratic problems are overstated, but still real, and we should work as if circumstances are against us and the Republicans won't implode. And if we actually gain seats, we get to watch pundit and conservative heads spin.