ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

[T]he power of journalism does not principally flow from word choice. (Don't call it a "misstatement" when it's really a "lie.") It does not flow from tonal presentation. (More than a half-century ago Richard Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, said network commentators revealed their bias "by the expressions on their faces, the tone of their questions, the sarcasm of their responses.") The point is that the power of journalism comes from the primacy of reporting -- from telling their audiences things that people in power would prefer they not know.

By this standard, it seems to me, that journalists shaped by the values and mindset of traditional journalism still demonstrate a lot of power -- more power than practitioners of the new and more avowedly ideological brand of journalism.

Some of the most newsworthy Washington stories of 2022 came in the form of three books. This Will Not Pass, from the spring, by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, exposed the hypocrisy and weakness of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy in privately vowing to confront Trump on election denialism -- "I've had it with this guy" -- before publicly reverting to obsequious support. This fall, co-authors Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser are out with The Divider, whose many revelations include how even purported Trump loyalists like his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told associates that "the crazies have taken over" at the White House after Trump refused to accept that he lost the 2020 election. Next week, Maggie Haberman will release her long-awaited Confidence Man, drawing on her decades of covering Trump. Already it has produced coverage of Trump's flushing official documents down the White House toilet and her revelation that the president in a fit of pique came close to using Twitter to fire his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner from the White House staff.

In addition to these books -- which built on exemplary reporting these journalists did for their primary news platforms -- let me add an example close to home. In what counts as one of the most extraordinary exclusives in memory, POLITICO journalists Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward in May reported on the internal Supreme Court draft overturning Roe v. Wade, accurately forecasting the landmark abortion rights ruling when it became public seven weeks later.

With the exception of Ward, who joined POLITICO last year, I've known all these reporters for many years, in some cases stretching back decades -- well enough to have a sense of what makes them tick as journalists. They are different in personal style and interests. But there are important similarities. The younger members of this set -- Burns, Martin and Ward -- did not start their careers in traditional legacy newsrooms, in the way that Baker, Gerstein and Glasser (and I) all did. Yet all are shaped by what I regard as traditional news values. One of those is a belief in the primacy of shared facts as the indispensable prerequisite to intellectually honest arguments. Another is the professional modesty to recognize that journalists are never in full possession of all the relevant facts.

Their most important similarity is a mania for reporting far exceeding the typical journalist. Gerstein as a college student reportedly used to monitor the police radio scanner even in his idle hours. He is famous among colleagues for his attention to detail and zealous use of the Freedom of Information Act. When I shared the White House beat at the Washington Post with Baker, he used to cold-call officials he didn't know at their desks, just to see what that might turn up. Like others mentioned here, he is the kind of reporter who can make colleagues wonder if we are in the right line of work.

All the work here involved establishing credibility and confidence with scores of sources with diverse motives and political orientations. They succeeded in large measure because those sources had every reason to trust their traditional professional standards.

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