Surprise! It's Politico.

I have written tens of thousands of words on what, precisely, is wrong with Politico. But I can put the case much more simply here: It's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.

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The Washington Post is the hometown paper of the city that everyone in America hates, usually for good reason. And the things Americans hate about that city and the people who work there are reflected in its pages.

The newspaper itself is an ever smaller and more starved-looking thing. The people running it used to actually compete with the New York Times, for readers and writers and national influence. Now they can't really decide if they even want to try.

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One shouldn't speak ill of the dead, I know. But if Newsweek has taught me anything this year, it's that death is not truly the end, because Heaven Is Real, According to Science.

Yes, that was an actual, for-real Newsweek cover this year: "Heaven Is Real." It was the dumbest, probably, but not actually the worst. This year's Newsweek covers also included naked bondage lady, and sexy lady about to fellate asparagus (a stock image that had also quite recently been used in at least two other magazines). There was "what if Princess Di was alive and my friend," too, but that was from 2011.

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Every Sunday morning, the big four broadcast networks all air their FCC-mandated "public affairs" programming, which consists of a host (a white guy) interviewing the same dozen lawmakers, journalists and pundits in a rotating order. The lawmakers are usually not the most powerful members of Congress -- often they're somewhat marginal figures in terms of influence, in fact -- and the pundits and journalists all generally share the same, or very similar, worldviews. The only people I actually know who watch these things do so out of professional obligation.

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Shortly after noon on Nov. 6, Time's Mark Halperin posted this on Twitter: "When John Harris & I wrote 'Drudge rules our world,' we were describing what IS, not what ought to be. Doubters already proven wrong today." A few hours later Barack Obama won reelection, which I assume came as a shock to people who do get most of their news from Matt Drudge.

Here's a brief tour of 2012 as the Drudge Report covered it.

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Arianna Huffington is brilliant. Her intellect is usually ignored by her detractors, who focus on her relentless ambition. Old-fashioned sexism taints so many pieces critical of Huffington that one sometimes feels a strong urge to defend her from the charge that she's cannibalizing and destroying American journalism.

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MSNBC, we're told all the time, is the liberal Fox News. That's reductive and stupid. It isn't. MSNBC isn't the liberal Fox News for two very important reasons: It usually demonstrates a greater respect for the truth than Fox News, and it's not as good as Fox News. It's not as good at being liberal as Fox is at being conservative. Fox is rigidly ideologically consistent, with its "straight news" programs echoing the same talking points and pushing the same slanted stories as its opinion shows. While there's no doubt that MSNBC is more unapologetically liberal than it used to be, it's still all over the place, with a conservative anchoring its flagship morning show, objective Beltway "straight news" proponents like Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell dominating in the daytime, and weekends full of ... prison shows. But more important, it's not as good as Fox at being compelling TV, which is why millions more people watch Fox every day. (There are demographic reasons for Fox's advantage, too, but it's still a huge number.)

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Magazines are great. I am a big fan of magazines. The Atlantic does a lot of things right, as a magazine. First of all, it makes money. Most magazines don't, really. I also give them credit for "figuring out The Web." Here is the secret of The Web: People like to read thoughtful people writing about and debating the issues of the day, and also they like really infuriating trolling. The Atlantic gives them both.

Here are some pieces from the latest issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on why more guns will solve gun control (counterintuitive!), Jessica Bennett and Rachel Simmons on how writing "xoxo" in emails is "feminizing the workplace," something on wacky Silicon Valley workspaces and offices. This is a fairly representative sample of the sort of thing in your average issue of the Atlantic.

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The New York Times is America's Last Newspaper, and because of that it is the recipient of a lot of grief that it doesn't always entirely deserve. Conservatives think it's the Daily Worker. Liberals blame it for Iraq and Bush's second term. Young people refuse to pay to read it.

The truth is, it is a good newspaper. It has great reporting that it spends a bunch of money on. It has a crossword puzzle. It has David Carr.

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Maybe we beat up on poor CNN too often. I have previously bemoaned CNN's inability to get breaking news right, offered advice on how to save the network and offered constructive criticism of their decision to hire Jeff Zucker. CNN was also well represented in 2011's Hack List, with Wolf Blitzer, Piers Morgan, Erick Erickson and Erin Burnett all making appearances.

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For some reason the man who created "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" is now America's foremost political satirist. Except he's not actually a satirist, he's a parodist. As a parodist he falls very short of the standard set by, say, (true American treasure) Weird Al. His milieu is "fake news," which is a very crowded field. But Borowitz is a one-man fake news machine, producing with soothing predictability an endless stream of topical jokes and sentences that resemble jokes, for Twitter ("Romney: 'It's time to transform America, and Paul Ryan and I are both Transformers.'" I think the joke there is that Romney and Ryan are robotic. Or maybe that they're evil?) and his new home at the New Yorker.

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In Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post currently employs a semi-official Mitt Romney spokesperson. There's not another prominent media figure who is more shameless about acting solely in the best interests of a presidential campaign. Bill Kristol is at this point a more intellectually honest commentator than Rubin has become.

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Sorkin is ... not as popular as he once was, when he was still just the creative mind behind the much-loved "Sports Night" and "The West Wing." People are, broadly, sick of his shtick. But he's also, undoubtedly, more professionally successful than ever, back in demand as a major film screenwriter (coming off an Oscar win followed by a nomination) and heading one of HBO's trademark "prestige" dramas. He seems nonplussed by the negative responses to his new show, "The Newsroom," and he has plenty of reason to be: To his mind, he's the same hack he's always been.

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I think this is maybe the ultimate Kathryn Jean Lopez Corner post. It's by no means the most stupid or wrong-headed or insane, just the one that best captures everything that makes her so depressing to contemplate:

SIGH [KJL ]
A very minor thing, but a trend: I heard a replay of Clay Aiken singing that Lee Greenwood song “God Bless the U.S.A.” at the Mall last night. The American Idol changed “I won’t forget the men who died” to “I won’t forget the ones who died.” Yes, women die in war, too. And not just in Iraq or Afghanistan. We know that. Do we really need Clay Aiken to spell it out? Would people really, seriously be offended if he sang “men”?
Posted at 12:23 PM

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Pretty much immediately upon the death of his father, Luke Russert inexplicably had a full-time broadcasting job, supplanting his part-time broadcasting job co-hosting a satellite radio sports talk show with James Carville. (That was a real thing that actually existed. Can you imagine a human who would want to listen to that?)

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On the back of my review copy of "The Tyranny of Clichés," Goldberg's latest, it still claims that the author "has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize." That, of course, was revealed yesterday to be utter bullshit. He is a two-time entrant for Pulitzer consideration -- to enter requires solely an application and a $50 fee -- and while Goldberg claims not to have added that line to his bio, it appears everywhere he writes, and it's hard to believe he hadn't noticed it until this week. That said, I can't imagine a person dumb enough to actually believe that Jonah Goldberg had been seriously considered for a Pulitzer. (Well, OK, I can imagine one person dumb enough.)

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