Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Slate Edition)

Outsourced to low-wage laborer Matthew Yglesias. He takes on John Dickerson:

Investigations | TPMCafe: John Dickerson, for example, seems to have decided that it was a major gaffe for Nancy Pelosi to tell The Washington Post that one thing a Democratic House Majority would do would be to hold oversight hearings. His rationale is that since Elizabeth Dole wrote a fundraising letter saying Democrats would "call for endless investigations, congressional censure and maybe even impeachment of President Bush" apparently the smart thing to do would be for Democrats to just deny any intention of mounting investigations.

There are a lot of problems with this theory.... Dole's letter was a fundraising mailing going out to hard-core Republicans... the 30 percent or so of Americans who approve of George W. Bush job performance.... [I]t makes perfect sense for GOP fundraisers to appeal to those people. But it also makes perfect sense for Pelosi to appeal to the much larger group of people who disapprove of Bush's performance. One of the main things those people might be hoping for from a Democratic congress would be a check on Bush's power. Indeed, many of them may not be very interested in a progressive agenda for America at all, just scared of where the current crew is heading things. By promising oversight, Pelosi is re-iterating that though you can't vote the unpopular Bush out of office, you can vote in a congress that will keep him under control.

Perhaps more to the point, what could possibly be served by denying that... a Democratic congress will mean subpoena power? What's at issue are two different ways of characterizing this. Dole wants people to think of partisan witch-hunts, Pelosi wants people to think of sober-minded oversight.... The only way to challenge Dole's characterization is for Pelosi to offer one of her own, which is exactly what she did.

When last we saw John Dickerson, he was arguing that even though he and two other Time reporters knew that the quotes from Scott McClellan they were publishing in Time were false, it would have been unethical for Dickerson to have told his readers that the quotes from McClellan were false by adding the sentence "But Time reporters suspect that McClellan's denials are not accurate" to a paragraph that ended:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous." Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion."

Why it would have been "unethical" to accurately report the story that Time reporters knew is something that Dickerson left unexplained. See http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/02/john_dickerson_.html and http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/02/hearts_and_mind.html. I think Dickerson believes that "it would have been unethical" means "McClellan would have yelled at me."

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?