I’ve been read­ing a lot of polit­i­cal cov­er­age this pri­mary season—too much for my or anyone’s health and sanity. And in the course of that read­ing I’ve devel­oped a number of pet peeves about polit­i­cal report­ing. Many of these, I real­ize, are common and long-​standing com­plaints: from the echo-​chamber aspect of it all to the too-​predictable cycle that car­ries “news” from a cam­paign con­fer­ence call on Day 0 to sites like TPM and Politico on Day 1 to arti­cles in the news­pa­pers and in Slate on Day 2.

But one major com­plaint that I haven’t seen aired before is that both the cam­paigns and the news media appear to share an assump­tion that seems to me mostly unwar­ranted. [Read more]