Mike Allen

On Friday, guest host of NPR’s On the Media Mike Pesca posed a great question in a fascinating piece on conventional wisdom. “Just who or what is coming up with this conventional wisdom?” Pesca asked. “And do they get paid by the platitude?”

Conventional wisdom–though the pundits who think they’re a source of the stuff might like to think otherwise–was not always a good thing. Indeed, as Pesca notes, the originator of the term, John Kenneth Galbraith, intended it as a pejorative. Nonetheless, the term itself became shorthand for pundits and lost its negative connotation long ago.

“There was a golden age of conventional wisdom,” Franklin Foer of the New Republic told Pesca. “You had these pundits, the Alsops, Walter Lippmann, David Broder issuing these judgments that were reflective of a broad set of thinking among the political class.”

So who are the Walter Lippmann’s of our day? Who has the ability to issue broad proclamations that are taken up by politicians and accepted as a form of currency redeemable at the ballot box? Apparently Politico‘s Mike Allen is at the top of the list for today’s top pundits for his daily email, the “Playbook.”

“I guarantee you that 99 percent of Washington D.C., that’s the first thing they read every morning,” Former Bush communications director Mark McKinnon told Pesca. “And everybody reads it. So, everybody’s sort of context for the events of the day are set by Mike Allen. I mean, that guy has more power than anybody in Washington, more than any senators or, or elected officials. It’s remarkable.”

Since Mike Allen and Politico is at the top of the list of today’s purveyors of conventional wisdom, it appears that, according to this post by Jeremy Peters at the New York Times Media Decoder blog, they’ve been rewarded by Random House to an eBook deal that’s certainly of the moment. During the presidential election next year, Random House will publish four short eBooks in the 20,000-30,000 word range (around the length that new publishers like Byliner are publishing) by Allen as well Evan Thomas of Newsweek.

So why the rush to publish the type of journalism that would ordinarily wait until after elections are over? “An impetus here is to encourage people to think of book publishers in a more periodical way,” Jon Meacham, executive editor of Random House told Peters.

Jim VandeHei, Politico‘s executive editor, put it a bit more honestly: ”Our audience, their preference would certainly be not to wait until the end of the election.”

All well and good I suppose, but it sure does seem a tad forced. If they’re not careful, they’re liable to render conventional wisdom meaningless.