As reported by Politico [1], recently dumped Meet the Press moderator David Gregory moderated a panel for the No Labels Strategic Agenda conference in Washington on Wednesday and lectured his media colleagues: "[I]n Washington political journalism the narrative gets set, and it gets set early and built on. And things that fight the narrative get harder to report out, I think, often because of laziness in media."
Given that Meet the Press on his watch was routinely a place to promote the conventional wisdom of Washington [2], Gregory is hardly one to accuse other journalists of lazily accepting inside-the-beltway spin in political coverage.
Gregory went on to whine to the No Labels crowd: "I think that the media…has gotten very attached to the idea that Washington is so dysfunctional and that the country is so frustrated with it. There is a self-fulfilling part of that."
Perhaps such commentary was an attempt to shield the Obama administration from a string of scandals and failures by blaming the media "narrative" for D.C. "dysfunction."
— Kyle Drennen is Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Kyle Drennen on Twitter. [3]