For decades American politics has been trapped in a cycle that benefits no one except the media companies that own TV stations: Politicians felt they had to advertise on TV to get elected (generally they were right). Politicians had to raise enormous sums of money to pay for those TV ads. The money went from contributor’s pockets directly into media coffers, with only a brief stop-off in campaign warchests. Politicians ended up beholden to contributors and devoting much of their energy to fundraising; the electorate got fed worthless “attack ads” and 30-second soundbites; only the TV station owners profited.

Today’s New York Times reports that, glory be, the era of TV political advertising may be beginning to fade:

The once-overwhelming influence of television advertising on political campaigns is declining, Democratic and Republican leaders say, leading them to embrace aggressively old- fashioned campaign tools like telephone calls and door-knocking in this year’s Congressional elections. While candidates continue to devote most of their resources to television, they say the power of commercials to affect an election’s outcome is being diluted by the glut of cable television stations, the popularity of such commercial-free premium networks as HBO and the anesthetizing frequency and similarity of political advertisements.

If this trend story proves accurate, it could be the best news in a long, long time.

Postscript: In comments a couple of people are saying, “Hey, phone calls, knocks on my door? That doesn’t sound like an improvement.” I disagree. Politics, real politics, is about getting out and talking to people — neighbors talking to neighbors, politicians actually facing the human beings they represent, supporters of candidates trying to persuade voters. This is retail politics, and I’ll take it any day over the wholesale game of TV ads.

This summer we saw the New York Times do some superb reporting on the growing debate over whether the U.S. should pre-emptively attack Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. While Bush and his administration tried to pretend that there was no debate and told the nation to “move along, move along, nothing happening here,” the Times accurately reported, in a series of front-page stories, that there were real divisions both among Bush’s close advisers and among the Republican old guard of foreign policy poobahs who’d advised his father.

Because of this reporting, the Times has come under fire from the right. Conservatives have argued that the Times is wearing an anti-war bias on its sleeve, and twisted the facts to support their case (see Josh Marshall’s careful debunking of the complaint that the Times inaccurately reported a Henry Kissinger position).

I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea, entrenched in the old Times culture, that reporters can become impersonal conduits for the news and completely screen their own biases from their coverage. Reporters are human beings; objectivity is a myth. For all I know the conservatives are right and Times executive editor Howell Raines really does feel that war with Iraq is a bad idea and has let that view shape his paper’s coverage. The Wall Street Journal wears its pro-markets philosophy on its sleeve; Fox News is the most biased major news organization in history; so what? Every news outfit has a tilt that’s shaped by the people who run it and the people who work at it.

The media form a vast ecosystem of information and ideas, and even an institution as powerful as the Times is only one stream. The value of any stream doesn’t lie in its putative freedom from bias but in whether it is contributing something important to the flow — some key piece of information, some perspective or some idea that would otherwise not surface.

What people are missing as they argue pointlessly over the “Is the Times biased?” trope is that the Times has played precisely the role it should — morally and constitutionally — in exposing the rift among Washington’s insiders. It ought to have been the Bush administration’s job, as it contemplates a new war, to spark a public debate, but Bush and his gang dropped the ball. Enter the free press. The echo here is of the Times’ publishing of the Pentagon Papers, its proudest moment, and another time when the right accused it of bias and of betraying the nation. Raines acknowledged this in a recent PBS interview: “As the Iraq debate plays out of a war, I’m hearing a lot of echoes of the early ’60s, when people were saying it was unpatriotic to report the debate over Vietnam… In this kind of reporting, one of the lessons of Vietnam is that it’s important to ask the questions at the front end of the war, not afterwards.”

War is grave business. In a democracy, we don’t and shouldn’t go to war without the people understanding why we’re doing it and what our goals are. If the government fails to set the stage for war, the press has not only a right but a stern duty to step in and ask difficult questions. It’s no surprise that those questions arouse consternation among the “invade first, ask questions later” crowd.

When I read it over my morning coffee, I liked Al Gore’s Sunday op-ed counterpunch to Joe Lieberman’s criticism of his populist, “I’m for the people, not the powerful” rhetoric in 2000. It seems that the Beltway punditocracy did not share the reaction. Slate’s William Saletan cites the piece as proof that Gore “still doesn’t get it.” The piece, Saletan argues, shows Gore hasn’t tamed the pugnacious streak that, according to Saletan, cost him the presidency: “As the 2000 presidential debates demonstrated, his driving imperative is to prove that he’s right and his opponents are wrong.”

The Saletan piece is the kind of classic inside-the-Beltway analysis that, too often, we get, not only from Slate but from the Washington Post and the rest of the political media. Saletan, a smart and insightful writer, seems to have no interest (as Josh Marshall points out today) in even exploring whether Gore was right or not. Right or wrong is irrelevant. Gore is chastised for even caring about whether he was right or wrong. All that matters is tactics. Did Gore find the precise point on the rhetoric dial to press the electorate’s buttons or not? Well, he didn’t win the election, so obviously he didn’t. (Though, actually, he did win a majority of the votes, but Saletan, like the rest of the Beltway world, won’t even think of going there — rehashing the contested 2000 election is so tiresome and unpatriotic in these days of the War on Something or Other.)

Even when viewed purely tactically, it’s not at all clear that Saletan is right to blame populism for Gore’s failure to capture more votes. Consider this L.A. Times analysis: “Exit polling from the 2000 campaign suggests that Gore’s populist appeal neither attracted the working-class voters it targeted nor repelled the more affluent voters that critics believe it alienated. More dramatic was the party’s decline in 2000 among culturally conservative rural voters.”

Gore has his patently obvious weaknesses as a candidate, but they have mostly stemmed from problems of image and failures of consistency. Whenever Gore puts on those populist shoes he keeps trying on, he goes somewhere interesting — somewhere that makes the world of Washington insiders profoundly uncomfortable, but that, in this season of outrage against government mismanagement of the economy and corporate misprision, makes a lot of sense to the rest of the country.

Our media class has a hard time focusing on more than one subject at a time. Keith Olbermann’s latest column suggests that the media’s (and political elite’s) mad quest to convict Bill Clinton of adultery helped push more important topics — like our vulnerability to terrorist attack — off the national agenda. It’s a great piece: “Ann Coulter didn’t cause Sept. 11… But with hindsight one has to ask why the prospect of a country unprepared for terrorism wasn’t a sexy enough topic for her and the others to use to pound Clinton and the Democrats.” Remember, during Monicamania, any time the Clinton administration decided to do anything in the international sphere — like firing missiles at bin Laden’s Afghanistan training camp — it was accused of pulling a “Wag the Dog” stunt to divert the national dialogue from the more pressing matter of the presidential genitalia.