Ex-NPR Reporter: Congress Is ‘Complete Theater’

Posted on Aug 22, 2012

Wikimedia Commons/Scrumshus

Andrea Seabrook left NPR this summer to start her own venture, DecodeDC, and she’s letting fly about what it’s like to “collude” with politicians as a daily news reporter.

As Seabrook explained to Politico: “I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say. ... And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

Peter Hart of FAIR put it this way on Twitter, “Ex NPR reporter says politicians lied to her every day. That would have been a great thing to, I dunno, report.”

—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer.

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