When I decided earlier this year to start a politically themed blog for Kitsch, I decided to be more than just a talking head. Instead I wanted to focus on what has become known as “Meta-News.” Meta-News is simply covering the way the media covers the news. It felt inventive, quirky, and most importantly fit Kitsch’s aims more so than being some partisan yahoo would.

As I watched the news this week, however, I started to become very worried. I felt like suddenly Meta-News was the news. Everyone from CNN to slate.com to the Christian Science Monitor was abuzz with coverage of ABC’s debate questions…. Frankly, that’s my job.

Now normally I would applaud such a venture as a much-needed debunking of the horse race mentality–a plea from the journalistic community to free itself from the bond of lunacy. But as the coverage dragged on, I realized a few things.

First, Meta-News has itself become an increasingly important part of media coverage. I believe this is in large part a response to the emergence of new media. The networks are shocked by YouTube and blogs and anything new is newsworthy. It is also a product of a healthy self-analysis. I sense that many in the media feel like they really messed up the last presidential election by allowing the “Swift Boat” ads to go unfettered for so long.

Second, the length of this race has made Meta-News a reality simply because the networks are competing for viewers. This has been the depressing part of the new trend. No one has won bigger this election season then MSNBC. They have slowly but surely chipped away CNN’s dominance of the news game. While this is almost exclusively due to superior coverage, I have started to wonder if their Meta-News coverage is really just an attempt to put the other guys down. Cornell’s own Keith Olbermann is probably most at fault here. His show became famous for attacking Bill O’Reilly. Very creatively, in fact, he once brought on a psychologist to analyze O’Reilly’s mental issues following his physical altercation with an Obama body guard. At times, however, it becomes a game of “we’re-better-than-you.” This is demonstrated by his propensity to read his ratings numbers among college students in comparison to Anderson Cooper’s. This is barely Meta-News; it is pettiness.

Third, old habits die hard and the Networks have turned Meta-News into another metric for this endless horse race. It has become a game of pointing out which media station has said “Hillary” more, which news source has written more pieces about Obama, or how many times one can say “McCain” in a row. The cries this week against ABC’s petty politics were part of this second horse race; not the race between the candidates but the race between competing media outlets. The issue becomes this: are the media ignoring substantive issues and instead covering each other? How much does political coverage become the media covering other reporters’ gaffes? Meta-News then becomes a substitute for real news.

When musing on this, I realized I might be part of the problem. I try to point out where the media’s coverage becomes weak and misses substance, but am I offering any substance of my own? I am just another talking head who tries to save himself by only talking about other talking heads? Eh… who knows?

With this said, overall I am so glad people jumped all over ABC’s simplistic, idiotic, and laughable debate. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Question 16, which began the debate’s second hour, was prefaced with “Now lets turn to the economy, as America says it is the number one issue.” This was the first issue-based question, the first question not about one of the candidates’ political gaffes. The number one issue becomes the number 16 question. How stupid do they think Americans are? I don’t give a flying crap if Obama eats arugula, or even if he is an elitist. Nor do I care if Hillary drinks whiskey or that she thought she had been attacked by sniper fire in Bosnia. (Hell, if I was in Bosnia during that mess I might have scared myself into thinking I got shot at, too). What I do care about is who is going to fix the economy, who is going to get us out of Iraq, and who is going to stop global warming.

In stark contrast to ABC’s best hits of bad journalism was Robert Reich’s post on his blog yesterday announcing his defection from the Clintons, whom he met at Yale Law School, to Obama. Reich was Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and is my political hero because he is the only man in politics shorter than me. He did not defect because of the calculus of political missteps, but instead as he said:

[Obama’s] plans for reforming Social Security and health care have a better chance of succeeding…. His approaches to the housing crisis and the failures of our financial markets are sounder than hers. His ideas for improving our public schools and confronting the problems of poverty and inequality are more coherent and compelling. He has put forward the more enlightened foreign policy and the more thoughtful plan for controlling global warming.

Imagine if ABC actually offered us a chance to hear the two on these issues. Maybe then the networks wouldn’t have to spend all day talking Meta-News.