But even more insidious than that is the positioning effect. Remember what I taught you: to understand the ideas in play, ask how a given form of journalism positions us, the users of it. What’s so weird about savviness is that it tries to position us as insiders, invited to speculate along with journalists and other players on how the mass public will react to the latest maneuverings. But the public is us.  We are the public. But we are also the customers for the savviness product. Don’t you see how strange that is?

Take the most generic “savviness question” there is. One journalist asks another: how will this play with the voters? Listening to that, how will this play with the voters, haven’t you ever wanted to shout at your television set, “hey buddy… (sorry, hey mate) I’m a voter! Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room when I’m sitting right here watching you.” This is what’s so odd about savviness as a political style performed for the public. It tries to split the attentive public off from the rest of the electorate, and get us to join up with the insiders. Under its gaze, other people become objects of political technique.

In campaign coverage, for example, nothing is more common that a good lesson in candidate strategy: how Mitt Romney plans to capture the nomination by skipping the Iowa caucuses. Or: Julia Gillard’s plan for taking Sydney’s western suburbs. That’s what fascinates the pros, the insiders. But think about it for moment: should we give our votes to the candidate with the best strategy for capturing our votes? Something is off there, or as I said earlier: circular. Misaligned.

A third idea we could do without helps explain why the first two–politics as a strategic game, the cult of savviness–are so common in the political press…

The production of innocence. 

This isn’t preached in journalism school or discussed in newsrooms; and it forms no conscious part of the journalist’s self-image. But it is real, a major factor in the news we get about politics.

By the production of innocence I mean ways of reporting the news that try to advertise or “prove” to us that the press is neutral in its descriptions, a non-partisan presenter of facts, a non-factor and non-actor in events. Innocence means reporters are mere recorders, without stake or interest in the matter at hand. They aren’t responsible for what happens, only for telling you about it. When you hear, “don’t shoot the messenger” you are hearing a journalist declare his or innocence.

This basic message—we’re innocent because we’re uninvolved—isn’t something to be stated once, in a professional code of conduct or an “about” page. It has to be said many times a day in the course of writing and reporting the news. The genre known as He said, she said journalism is perhaps the most familiar example. But so is horse race journalism, in which the master narrative for covering an election is: who’s ahead?  Journalists will tend to favor descriptions of political life that are a.) true, in that verifiable facts support the story; and b.) convenient for the continuous production of their own innocence.

One of the great attractions to horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Innocence is bliss.

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things!  He said, she said journalism doesn’t tell us who’s distorting the picture more. It is neutral on where the reality is, but reality is not something journalists can afford to be neutral about!

Political journalism should help us get our bearings in a world of confusing claims and counter-claims. But instead we have savviness, the dialect of insiders bringing us into their games. Nothing is more characteristic of the savvy style than statements like “in politics, perception is reality.” Doesn’t that statement make you mad? Whenever I hear it, I want to interrupt and say, “No, no, no. You have it wrong. In politics, perception isn’t reality. Reality is reality!”

But then I stop myself. Because I realize I sound like a lunatic.

I want to read you a famous from American journalist Ron Suskind’s account of the Bush White House in 2004. It was called “Beyond a Doubt” and it told of a “retreat from empiricism” in the Bush White House. You’ll probably recognize parts of it. Here’s journalist Ron Suskind, who had a lot of sources within the Bush government.

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush,” Suskind wrote, introducing his characters. “He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.”

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I had a chance to meet Suskind once, to look into his eyes and judge for myself whether this chilling story was something that actually happened, or just a good yarn. I think it actually happened. And we can see the evidence in our politics.

The leading contender for the Republican nomination for president, Rick Perry, is emerging as a climate change denialist. We might call this verification in reverse. Verification, which is crucial to journalism, means nailing down assertions with verifiable facts. Verification in reverse is taking established facts and manufacturing doubt about them, which creates political friction, and the friction then becomes an energy source you can use for campaigning. It’s a political technique.

Now: how should political journalists stand toward this technique? As savvy insiders who know how the game is played and need to maintain their innocence? If they do that, and verification in reverse grows and succeeds, it will be the equivalent of running over the press with a truck. Journalism will become superflous. “When we act, we create our own reality” wasn’t so much boast as a taunt. It was an operative telling a journalist, “you don’t count.” We can create our own reality and you guys can’t stop us.

What is to be done: A thought experiment

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Yes, Jay, but what do we do about all this? Do you have a better idea?

I do. But I have to admit, it’s only an idea. A thousand things stand in its way. The savvy would tell me: this is not practical. So let’s call it a thought experiment. Its purpose its just to loosen up our imaginations, and point the way to something better. Imagine the entirety of the political reporting and commentary produced by the Washington bureau of the New York Times or the political staff of the ABC and plot it on a grid. On the left side of the page: appearances. On the right side: realities. On the top of the page arguments. On the bottom facts. Appearances, realities, arguments and facts. All political news should be divided into these categories, and journalists should organize their daily report into my four quadrants.

Under appearances we find everything that is just that: the attempt to make things appear a certain way. All media stunts. Everything that fits under the management of impressions. Or politics as entertainment. The photo ops. The press releases issued in lieu of doing something. Lindsay Tanner’s book is full of examples from the day to day life of a minister of government. My suggestion is report appearances as just that: mere appearances. Which would be a way of jeering at them, and labeling them not quite real. So the appearances section would be heavy on satire and simple quotation. In the U.S., Jon Stewart has become a huge star by satirizing the world of appearances. This would be a way to get in on some of that action. Appearances, then, is a way of downgrading or penalizing politicians who deal in the fake, the trivial, the merely sensation. In other words: watch out or you’ll wind up in the appearances column.

Under realities we find everything that is actually about real problems, real solutions, real proposals, consequential plans and of course events that deserve the title: political events.  This is the political news proper, cured of what Tanner calls the sideshow.

But then there’s my other axis. Arguments and facts. Both are important, both are a valid part of politics.

So imagine my four quadrants.

The bottom left: Appearances rendered as fact. Example: the media stunt.

Top left: Phony arguments. Manufactured controversies. Sideshows.

Bottom right. Today’s new realities: get the facts. The actual news of politics.

Top right: Real arguments: Debates, legitimate controversies, important speeches.

Now imagine all of today’s political news and commentary sorted into these four quadrants. This becomes the new portal to political news. Appearances and realities, arguments and facts. To render the political world that way, journalists would have to exercise their judgment about what is real and what is not. And this is exactly what would bring them into proper alignment with our needs as citizens.

Draft post. Uncorrected. Likely to be revised a bit after I give this talk.