Yeah, I kind of hated myself for following the links, but it was worth it to end up at Gabriel Sherman's TNR post, for this nugget (emph. added):
Last month, Politico’s chief foreign policy writer David Cloud resigned after only six months on the job. “It wasn't a good fit for me,” Cloud told me by phone this afternoon. Cloud joined Politico in January. In making the announcement, Politico’s top editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei stressed that Cloud’s hiring represented Politico’s commitment to broadening its coverage outside the horse race of Beltway politics. “David's hiring is part of our ongoing effort to expand coverage of Washington governance, the new administration and national defense,” they wrote in a staff memo on January 14.
But Cloud didn’t take to Politico’s model of obsessive, politics-only reporting, and its freewheeling newsroom where staffers are expected to file news, often on multiple beats simultaneously. “Partly what I found, having come from the New York Times, there weren't [enough] resources,” Cloud explained. “They needed someone to cover the waterfront: foreign policy, defense, Obama's position in the world, which are all important things. I didn't want to be the sole person opining or reporting on these matters. It was too much of a burden at that point in my career.”
“One of my frustrations about the place,” Cloud continued, “I’m used to covering those things straight, by straight I didn’t mean they were pressuring me to inject some point of view into a story. It’s all done through the lens, ‘what does this mean for Obama?’ It’s an important lens to view things through, but it’s not the only lens I wanted to view those events through.”
I'd say a more honest way to put the part that I bolded is, "How can this be spun as a problem for Obama?" But I'll take this bit of confirmation nonetheless.
(h/t: Andrew Sullivan)
No comments:
Post a Comment