Politico editor offers misleading defense of Cheney stenography

The Plum Line's Greg Sargent gets Politico editor John Harris to defend Politico's uncritical copying-and-pasting of Dick Cheney's attacks on the Obama administration. But Harris's defense doesn't hold water.

Harris writes "[I]t seemed to me that the people who found Cheney's comments most objectionable were the ones who found them most newsworthy."  What does that even mean?  That the people who found Cheney's comments objectionable objected to them, which means they were noteworthy?  That's incredibly circular. Further, Harris is ducking: He ignores a key aspect of the criticism of Politico, which was not merely that Cheney's comments didn't deserve attention, but that Politico failed to place them in appropriate factual context.  

Next, Harris suggests that it's ok that Politico uncritically passed along Cheney's attacks because other Politico articles filled in some of the gaps: 

If you look at the other stories we ran at the same time as the Cheney quote there was a Josh Gerstein piece leading the site comparing Obama's response to Bush's after the 2001 shoe bomber and debunking the notion that Obama's response was more sluggish. We also had a piece looking at GOP politicization of national security.

If anyone should be aware of the need for individual articles to stand on their own, it should be a Politico editor.  How many people sit down and read Politico cover-to-cover?  Somewhere in the neighborhood of "none," I'm guessing.  If it was ever adequate for a news organization to pass along unfiltered partisan attacks in one report, then add the necessary context in other reports, that time is long gone.  It simply doesn't reflect the way people consume news.

Finally, Harris offers this:

Trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do. Also in December we had a long Q and A with the other prominent former vice president Al Gore. That story might also have looked to some like providing an uncritical platform if you viewed it only isolation.

Another misleading dodge.  The Cheney article that drew criticism wasn't the result of a "long Q and A."  It was based on what Politico described as a Cheney "statement to Politico."  A press release, in other words.  Which Politico reporter Mike Allen dutifully copied-and-pasted in its entirety.  It isn't a "Q and A" if the person providing the A doesn't face any Q.