Journalist analyses all the other journalists who write about their expeditions to darkest Trumplandia

These guys have their heads so far up their asses, they’ve got shit for snot…

If the immediate critique after the election was that political reporters didn’t get out into the heartland and listen to people drawn to Trump, the pendulum has since swung in the opposite direction. Virtually all national outlets have run some version, and likely multiple versions, of a story taking the temperature of Trump country, be it a hard-on-its-luck coaltown in Appalachia or a hollowed-out manufacturing hub in the upper Midwest. Regional newspapers have more recently jumped on the bandwagon as well. The pieces focus heavily on the white working class, a group portrayed as struggling to come to grips with its dimming economic fortunes and diminished social dominance in a multicultural and post-industrial America. They’ll support Trump, the narrative goes, until the factory jobs come back–which is to say, forever. (…)

Like Zito, he created his own pithy formulation to illustrate such divisions: front-row kids versus back-row kids. The former, who include journalists, are educated and define themselves largely by their careers. The latter are more tied to physical communities, with deep, if narrow, social networks. While front-row kids fret about democratic norms and America’s standing on the international stage, their counterparts in the back row worry about steady work and maintaining dignity in the face of global elites. For back-row kids to enter the daily meltdown that is political media Twitter, he says, would be akin to “coming down from a mountain, walking into a village you’ve never been to before, and saying, What the fuck is going on?”

“It used to be that political reporting was a lot like anthropology—and I don’t mean to sound like I’m steeped in nostalgia,” says Keller, who now edits The Marshall Project, a criminal justice-focused nonprofit . “[Reporters] would sit down with voters and really get to understand their core satisfactions and aspirations, the things people don’t necessarily tell pollsters. They’d steep themselves in the electorate long enough to really have a feeling of what was driving them. Nowadays, we’re such slaves to data that if somebody comes back with a notebook full of that reporting, they could hear from an editor ‘That’s anecdotal, where’s the data?’ Nothing is credible unless you can make a metric case for it.”

(Of course, “data” is just anecdotes but after the words have been transformed into numbers.)

Regardless, Zito will keep running up the mileage on her Jeep. Arnade will continue his stops at McDonald’s. And many of the rest of us will continue wondering whether the people they cover have made a disastrous mistake.