Politico is quickly becoming an "Instant" Web Source-But Who are They, and whom do They Serve?

[FrenchieCat]

The Politico launched Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007

It is my belief that we should exercise extreme caution with this type of "newly sprung up website", especially if it is owned and operated by the same corporate media interests that we are attempting to become independent of.

Politico is ran and managed by a Republican who served in the Reagan administration.


background on Politico:

The Politico is a Washington, D.C.-based political journalism organization that distributes its content via television, the Internet, newspaper, and radio. Its coverage includes Congress, Washington lobbying, and the 2008 presidential election.<1> It was a sponsor of the 2008 Republican Presidential Candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on May 3, 2007 and the 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidates debate at the Kodak Theater on January 31, 2008.

John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei left The Washington Post to become The Politico's editor-in-chief and executive editor, respectively.

The Politico is financed by Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington and elsewhere, and is an affiliate of Disney-owned ABC.

Frederick J. Ryan Jr., former Assistant to U.S. President Ronald Reagan<2>, and currently chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, is president and CEO of The Politico.<3>

On March 22, 2007, Politico writer Ben Smith erroneously reported via blog<9> that John Edwards would suspend his presidential campaign in the wake of his wife's cancer recurrence, a claim that was headlined by the Drudge Report and cable news channels including MSNBC.<10> Smith later apologized for relying on a single anonymous source for the story.<11>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politico

What we don't want to do is to set ourselves up. Part of the media's current frustration in their struggle to remain relevant, as we Internet activists and ravenous news consumers are no longer chained to Corp. media sources without recourse as we once were. Due to the Internet and a bit of history behind us, we are not who we were in 2000 and 2004. As progressives, we have been able to build our own News web sources that we know to be if not reliable, then at least journalistically independent of big corporate media. Whether it is TPM (Talking Point Memo) or KOS, or the Prospect, or http://www.brooklynron.com, http://www.oliverwillis.com, http://www.americablog.com , salon.com, the Nation, etc........

Most of us don't go to Drudge as a newsource, and we should be treating Politico with the same sort of sKepticisms, IMO. I am not suggesting that we should not include it on our menu, but we should not allow it to become our main entre on a daily basis.

Just checking the last two days, here is some of what I have found posted with Politico as the source here at DU-
The Bad news is that most of these are actual thread headers......and Have "Politico" as part of the headline,
as though including the name makes the headline more bonafide. Note; it doesn't.

Politico admits pushing the RFK quote too soon.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=6140263

The Politico writes this morning that "many top GOP strategists believe (McCain) can defeat Barack Obama -- and by a margin exceeding President Bush's Electoral College victory in 2004."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=6095939&mesg_id=6107619

Earlier, the Republican National Committee pounced on Obama's improbable statement that an uncle had served in the unit that liberated Auschwitz.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=6148806

Politico: Obama is Fidel Castro's preferred candidate
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=6136270

A Guide To Undisciplined Messaging - Politico
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=6138131

CBS News and CBSNews.com partners with Politico.com for campaign 2008 coverage.
As does The Washington Post, aka General Electric/NBC/MSNBC/CNBC, and also ABC News owned by Disney (Disney partners with Time-Warners who owns CNN)

***WARNING****

The Politico's John Harris admits now what he denied last year(updated below)
Glenn Greenwald

John Harris, former National Political Editor of The Washington Post and current Editor-in-Chief of The Politico, wrote a column yesterday acknowledging the extremely obvious truths about his "profession" -- that because they are obsessed with attracting traffic-generating links, they focus on empty trivialities at the expense of substantive news:

The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories -- the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top -- can dominate the campaign narrative for days. . . .

As leaders of a new publication, Politico's senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news -- sometimes big news, sometimes small -- that drives that day's conversation.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/26/harris/index.html

Just sayin'........