It’s a slow news cycle these days, so I’m going to do one of those meta-posts about blogging and reporting. The Politico has a piece on NYT columnist Frank Rich’s criticism of media heavyweights David Broder (often called the “Dean of political journalists”) and Mark Halperin (who writes The Page for Time magazine and founded the uber-insider tip sheet The Note over at ABC). The jist of the piece is that Rich never leaves Manhattan so how can he write about what the coverage of races in Iowa and Manhattan. Halperin in particular says of his own on-the-ground reporting that

“I am able to talk to the candidates and their senior staff and watch the faces of Iowans….[I can] see the looks in their (the candidates’ and staffers’) eyes and the body language.”

Now, let’s step back and try to see this in a larger context. In poker, it was once widely believed that watching your opponents’ movements and demeanor — looking for “tells” in the parlance of the game — was an important part of good poker playing. It might follow then that, in a live tournament, a player who has had experience playing live poker games should have an advantage someone who plays poker online. Then in 2003, the World Series of Poker was won by a man who had only played poker online prior to the tournament.

In baseball scouting, it was widely believed that first-hand observation of players’ habits, body-type, and the like was more important than looking at their statistics. Scouts even talked about the “good face“, the facial features which they (irrationally) associated with future success in the bigs. Then Oakland As exec Billy Beane demonstrated, pretty conclusively, that stats like on-base-percentage were more important than how a player looks in jeans.

Are political reporters ready to admit that the look on a candidate’s face is not nearly important as the details of his or her health care proposal? That chumming it up with John McCain is more likely to distort your view of his candidacy than to sharpen its focus?

None of this means that first-hand reporting is without value — here at RT we try to do as much eyewitness reporting as possible. But too often, journalists short-circuit real, open discussion by saying “I’ve met him and you haven’t so shut up and let us lecture you.” The D&C editorial board is a case in point.

In 2001, after meeting Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush said

I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.

In the six years since then, Putin has murdered reporters, jailed his political opponents, and otherwise made a complete mockery of Russian democracy. So much for Bush’s powers of personal perception.

George W. Bush, of course, is an idiot. But I would argue that his idiocy most clearly manifests itself not in the poor quality of his subjective personal judgements, but rather in his tendency to rely on such judgements in the first place.

When journalists –whether they’re high-profile media stars or Gannet lifers — substitute these personal judgements for factual analysis, they lower themselves to the intellectual level of the worst president in American history.