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By Root 836 0

the Freak Show. The phrase, they say, originated in a “late-night epiphany while channel-surfing” when one of them, or both together (as I prefer to imagine), was watching a cable-news show that featured “a collection of reporters and commentators from the Left and Right shouting at one another about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.” Halperin and Harris use “Freak Show” to denote the entire “new arena in which politics is waged,” and although they mean primarily the partisan media and the new media, they also include the mainstream media, insofar as Freak Show stories percolate thereinto. This inclusiveness seems right, as does the word “show,” a characterization that captures the fundamental point: the chief appeal for the viewer is not information but rather a peculiar sort of entertainment, the monitoring of the partisan political contest in the same manner as one keeps up with one’s favorite football team. The phrase “Freak Show” falls short, though, in its implication that this daily assemblage of tiny, ad hominem stories about politicians is just a wild corner of some larger and more sedate country fair. In fact, with the rise of the left-wing “netroots” (whose frequent, withering, and not unconvincing critiques of the so-called mainstream media have eroded trust in those outlets among liberals in the same way that right-wing groups did among conservatives during the 1990s), the slow fiscal decline of U.S. newspapers (which has further cut away at the clout, and indeed the self-confidence, of traditional news organizations), and the explosion of blogs and online video (which has multiplied the demand for more, and more viral, political stories at all hours of the day and night), it is no exaggeration to say that the Freak Show has become quite nearly the whole show.

If pressed to pick a single event that heralded the freaks’ ascendance, I might even choose the announcement in November 2006, just as the 2008 presidential campaign was beginning, that John Harris himself—coauthor of The Way to Win and, as national political editor of the Washington Post, a comfortably ensconced Washington-media insider—was leaving the Post to head a start-up politics publication, which would publish on paper three days a week in D.C. proper but whose primary audience would be online. Leaving the Post along with Harris was Jim VandeHei, one of the paper’s top politics correspondents, and together the two quickly made three equally impressive hires: Mike Allen came over from Time, Roger Simon from Bloomberg News, Ben Smith from the New York Daily News. Up until this point, although elite American political journalists had expended many words about how the web was changing political discourse, almost none of them (with the exception of Andrew Sullivan, the former New Republic editor who presciently threw himself into blogging in 1999) had in any way staked their careers on it. Now, five well-known writers had left their comfortable, reputable jobs for an unproven web venture, a fact that—for other journalists, at least—could be assigned one of two interpretations, equally frightening. The first was that Internet journalism, and the partisan mêlée it inevitably engendered, had gone mainstream; the second was that print journalism’s economic prospects had sunk so low that there was little to lose by abandoning ship.

The new venture was eventually named The Politico, a fitting moniker in an era when Internet media encourages its niche audiences to style themselves as armchair insiders. Also fitting, given the ratings awareness that Internet-centric culture cannot avoid, is the fact that The Politico was a bet made with TV money: that of Allbritton Communications, the owner of ABC affiliates in Washington and six other cities. On a snowy day in February 2007, just weeks after the site had launched, I went to visit The Politico’s editors in Rosslyn, Virginia, at the offices that it shares with WJLA Channel 7. As I waited in the lobby, a harried-looking woman in a coat rushed in from the newsroom. “If you hear of anyplace that’s out of toilet paper,