Dan Froomkin has a powerful piece on some of the big problems of news coverage today, somewhat cheekily framed as “here’s how I’d do it” speech for the next executive editor at The Washington Post or New York Times. For starters, he suggests ditching the horse-race coverage that dominates political reporting and instead focus on how well the government is governing:

While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent, and write up what you’ve learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?

And rather than obsess on bipartisanship, we should recognize that the solutions we need – and, indeed, the American common ground — sometimes lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.

Again, the truth of the world not just the facts of it.

I also deeply appreciate how Froomkin’s analysis doesn’t begin and end with the past four years. He stretches back to the mendacity of the Bush/Cheney regime and the complacency of the Obama years, as well as the media’s role in elevating a demagogue sideshow to the presidency, as failures in equal footing.

It’s a great piece and one of the best hard looks at the media I’ve read in a long time.