We Are ++Screwed

Bad enough:

What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism. I noticed the same pattern (and the same nearly reporter-free campaign trail) in Kentucky last month as I covered libertarian Rand Paul's decisive defeat of the state Republican establishment in the GOP Senate primary. Aside from an occasional AP reporter, virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered at campaign events were my national press-pack colleagues from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Atlantic Monthly.

But Hokey Smokes, look at the apparent replacements (which we kindly bolded) & their coverage.

The gradual abandonment of on-the-ground campaign coverage means that polls are fast becoming the only way to glimpse voter sentiment. Since most polls in statewide races (particularly primaries) are automated short-answer surveys, it becomes easy to jump to blunderbuss conclusions like "all incumbents are imperiled" or "the Tea Party movement is all-powerful."

After Republican Scott Brown sent conventional wisdom reeling by winning Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in January, an analysis of the media coverage demonstrated why the press was so slow to realize an upset was in the making. The reason: Political reporters never left Boston, even though no place in Massachusetts is more than a three-hour drive away. The study by the Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism found that only 6 percent of major newspaper and AP stories covering the last two weeks of the general election campaign were based on non-Boston coverage.