By Scott Dickensheets

    When bad news happens to good people, journalists always remind us not to kill the messenger.
    But what if the messenger is Sam Donaldson?
    What if it's John McLaughlin--is it at least OK to offer the messenger a breath mint and a Xanax?
     It's hardly surprising that journalists are the only ones who still believe in the sanctity of the messenger; they're among the last ones to grasp how bad the news is.    
    That's particularly true of those in the clubby treehouse of Washington journalism, where the messenger is part of the problem.
    "Insider baseball" is the cliché of choice to describe the mutually sustaining insularity of reporters and the reported-upon in our nation's capital.
    But I prefer to think of it as performance journalism--an essentially symbolic act draped in layers of diaphanous irony and knowingness, played for a crowd of sophisticates who pretend to know what it all means.
    Cokie Roberts, your NEA grant is pending.
    Recently, the Washingtonian magazine issued a ranking of the 50 most powerful journalists in the city; what was surprising was that a few real journalists actually made the list, there among the self-promoters, spinderellas and dispensers of Sunday public-affairs-show mythology.
    When James Wolcott wrote a wicked smart column in Vanity Fair lampooning the talking-head spindustry, he was able to whack that insider baseball over the fence because it was such an easy pitch.
    Unlike Vanity Fair, the Washington Monthly is not a journal of satire and parody. It's a serious public-policy watchdog for which the term "wonkish" is a perfect fit.
    The sorry state of government journalism has stuck in its editorial craw, and, in the March edition, the magazine has responded.
    "Reassigning Tim Russert: Getting Washington reporters to cover the things that matter" is a package of 13 bite-size essays that advise the profession on various ways to heal itself.
    They are well-intentioned, thoughtfully reasoned, entertainingly written and utterly irrelevant.
    The participants know this, of course. "Those who offer suggestions to the Washington media need not worry that their advice will be taken," Jonathan Rowe writes by way of introducing a nine-part refresher in Journalism 102.
    They include "tell the story, not the script," "mention the  money," "yesterday matters," "words matter" and this column's favorite, Rowe's injunction to dispense with "ritual and say-nothing quotes."
    That Rowe feels he must offer the Washington press corps the same advice that a city editor in Muncie might dispense to a cub reporter shows just how deep the problem is.
    USA Today's Walter Shapiro suggests, with the appropriate mix of seriousness and whimsy, the establishment of a TV roundtable or daily web roundup of news from the nonglamorous beats of government coverage. 
    While he doesn't actually believe that would up the glam quotient of your average HUD reporter--and therefore his topic--he does think it would prompt more reporters to dig into subjects not normally aired on Tim Russert's time.
    Speaking of Russert, Timothy Noah advocates getting him and other "top-dog reporters" out of the spotlight and onto a public-policy beat for the first year of the Bushocracy. 
    Art Levine extols the investigative reporting of Barlett and Steele, while Steven Waldman worries about the derogatory effects of investigative journalism that focuses only on the negative. 
    Scott Shuger bemoans the lack of historical perspective among Washington's chattering class, while Jonathan Alter notes that "fewer and fewer people are actually gathering news; more and more are processing and analyzing it." (This column pleads guilty.)
    Such summaries badly oversimplify what are for the most part heartfelt and very cogent arguments. And the writers are to be commended for maintaining such chipper attitudes whilst they piss into the wind.
    Because let's face it, no one but the Washington Monthly and maybe 37 other Americans wants anything to change.
    Government doesn't. Nobody at, say, the Department of Energy wants reporters sniffing around its budget, counting paper clips. 
    The bigfoot reporters don't. Will you be invited to Washington Week in Review to discuss teachers' salaries? 
    And--be honest!--we don't, not really, do we?
   Status-quo journalism from our Washington bureaus is our political-intellectual comfort food.
    On the rare occasion that someone does gouge a bit of hot, important news from a government backwater, how many of us really slog through the four-part series and seven sidebars? (Quick, name your favorite Barlett and Steele opus!)
    Maybe we're just getting the government coverage we deserve.

-Scott Dickensheets is the magazine critic for Media Life.

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