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I disagree with you. This editorial is very bad, and Chuck Todd should feel bad for writing it.
This isn't new. Herbert Hoover's magisterially-dyspeptic magnum opus goes into microscopic detail about all the ways various FDR-administration officials and allied journalists lied and slanted the truth to manage and manipulate public opinion during the depression, New Deal period, and WWII, and the number of people who remember or care today round to zero. Heck, even the "really famous" examples like the NYT lying about the Holodomor in Ukraine, or rabidly defending the Lindsay administration in NYC at the time, then excoriating it in Lindsay's obituary, are just cocktail-party trivia and not seriously internalized lessons.
How do you get "incrementalism" from "the country is politically-divided"? It really smacks of "we just need to make sure we boil the frog slowly so it doesn't jump out." No instinct towards actual compromise or even honest open conflict; just dishonest slow-rolling and gaslighting about ultimate endgames until it's too late and the fait accompli can be imposed on a prostrate foe. Of course, this strategy also has the side-effect of not being at all concerned with actual quality of governance in the mean-time...if you're suffering from a gushing stab wound, incremental care, one bandaid at a time, won't stop you from bleeding out even if stitches or cauterization would really hurt in the short-term.
Our political information ecosystem is primarily geared towards rationalizing already-extant beliefs. That's how you get in people's customized algorithms - feeding them plausible-sounding affirmation of things they already believe. It's not a question of "nuance" or "incrementalism" - what do those even mean in the context of journalism? That you shouldn't report facts if it looks like they lead to an "unnuanced" conclusion or one that is a radical departure from current consensus? And why do we think that our information delivery system should be characterized by the same qualities as policymaking in the first place? To even ask the question betrays the degree to which unbiased investigation has been subordinated to ideological preference.
A nitpick, but Hoover’s magnum opus was definitely a certain translation project.
Weren’t they also responsible for translating and publish “Always With Honor” in the west?
One of my favorite books. A short memoir of Pyotyr Wrangel, the most famous and successful general in the white army during the Russian civil war.
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Yo I forgot Lou and he did that!!! Thank you for reminding me; one more reason the Hoovers are among my personal heroes.
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