#political-journalism

#political-journalism

Lippmann was one of the most successful people who ever lived.... No other journalist in American history has had so much influence on events, had his hand in so many state papers, been on such equal terms with the great. No other wrote books that became such famous keys to each era in turn, was able to impart to newspaper and magazine columns, with such a magisterial air of cultivation, political intelligence of the coolest and most decisive sort.

After nearly five decades, Dan Balz is retiring from The Washington Post, where he covered 12 elections and eight presidencies as a political correspondent. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg asks Balz about the state of American democracy today, and how he's seen the landscape of politics change. "Over the course of 50 years that I've been doing this, I think that the most important shift," Balz said last night, is that "politics has gotten tougher, coarser, and meaner."