Remapping Debate, a fledgling online news journal focusing on domestic public policy and staffed by former New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review journalists, launched last week. Craig Gurian, the journal's editor, wrote a piece for CJR last month that touched on some of the flaws in existing media coverage of public policy:

Buried behind stories that explicitly or implicitly describe a particular policy as “natural” or “inevitable” or “realistic” are a bevy of underlying assumptions about the “impracticality” of alternative choices. The result is that robust policy debate is constricted, even at the moments when very large decisions are being made. Indeed, the treatment of a single policy direction as something akin to a natural phenomenon conceals the fundamental fact that each policy put or kept in place does reflect a decision that serves some interests more than others.

Remapping Debate's web page adds:

The heart of our work will be original reporting. We take seriously the idea that the job of journalists is to question and to illuminate. We believe that we need to question ourselves as much as we question others.

We think we need to reject the mental borderlines that leaves “mainstream” reporters generally speaking to “mainstream” sources, and “alternative” reporters generally speaking to “alternative” sources.

We insist that it is probing – not stenography – that can illuminate and inform, and that challenging a policy maker or policy advocate to engage with alternatives to a pre-scripted sound bite represents not commentary but an essential element of real reporting.

This is all spot-on.

Think back to last year's stimulus debate, when many economists, including Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman and Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer, believed that the stimulus should be significantly larger than the package under discussion, a view that was largely absent from media coverage of the debate. It seems clear that absence was a result of the media/pundit/political class's belief that a stimulus package in excess of $1 trillion would be impossible to pass.

But was it really impossible? We'll never know, but recent political history is full of examples of things happening that would have been considered impossible just a short time before. How many people would have said in late 2007 that it would be possible to get even a $500 billion stimulus package through Congress just a year and a half later? Very few, I suspect -- and yet Congress passed a $787 billion bill in February 2009. In 1998, congressional Democrats -- and a few Republicans -- argued that a $78 billion tax cut proposal was too large. A year later, Congressional Republicans were pushing a tax cut that was ten times as large. Shortly after that, George W. Bush began campaigning on a $1.3 trillion tax cut package. And in 2001, Congress passed a $1.35 trillion tax cut that was unfathomable just two years earlier. When Bob Barr tried to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in late 1997, there were two kinds of people in Washington: Those who ignored Barr, and those who laughed at him. A year later, the House impeached Clinton. And so on.

Many reporters, I think, place far too much faith in the old maxim that "politics is the art of the possible." That's because the word “possible” doesn't mean in politics what it means in physics or mathematics. Physicists may be able to counteract gravity, but they can't turn it off. Mathematicians have to live with the fact that four is greater than two. But in politics, it's harder to know -- and easier to change -- what is “possible.” Today's “impossibility” can be tomorrow's stunning legislative victory -- if key players in politics and media decide not to treat it as impossible.

For reporters, that all adds up to something fairly simple: When they treat something as “impossible” or “inevitable,” they are helping to make it so -- and, thus, constraining the debate. To return to the stimulus example, the public would have been better served had the media focused on determining and describing what was needed rather than limiting themselves to what they thought was possible.

Anyway: back to Remapping the Debate. The journal's web site doesn't yet feature much content, but this “story repair” piece in which Greg Marx re-writes a Politico article offers a promising glimpse of what they're trying to do.