They Seem to Think the Next Four Years Will Be Normal

The big debates over political journalism in the Trump years were about morality. What began with arguments over whether the media should call something a “lie” or “racist” has now become: How do you cover a Republican Party that votes to overturn an election?

But an ambitious political news start-up hoping to tell the central story of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s years is, a bit like Mr. Biden himself, less concerned with those big questions. The publication is called Punchbowl, after the Secret Service’s moniker for the U.S. Capitol, and it promises a scoop-driven, just-the-facts-ma’am operation founded by three defectors from the Washington publication Politico. One is Capitol Hill’s leading scoop-getter, Jake Sherman. He was the narrator for the political class in Politico’s newsletter Playbook and on Twitter for the bizarre negotiations over pandemic relief between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, with a tuned-out President Trump. He broke the outline of the final $900 billion deal on Dec. 16. He and his partners, Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan, are betting that there’s a large, paying audience of readers more interested in how power works in America than in journalists’ views on how it ought to work.

“There is a segment of the world that thinks Mitch McConnell is the devil and just wants to read nasty stuff about Mitch McConnell all day long,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview. “But there is a massive segment of the world who wants to understand what Mitch McConnell does and why he’s doing it.”

Punchbowl, which sent its first dispatch on Sunday night, is the latest news outlet to be started by veterans of Politico, the organization founded in 2007 to cover politics with the speed of the internet and the glee of “SportsCenter.” I wrote a blog for the site then, and my blog was illustrated by a caricature of me sitting on the fence at, literally, a horse race. Our unofficial goal was to be a “needle in the vein of political junkies,” and we wrote for a large audience of insiders and interested outsiders who saw politics, more or less, as a sport.

But nobody thinks politics is much fun anymore, and the notion of covering politics as an amoral sport has become repellent to Americans. The big legacy news operations — The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, in particular — became players in Trump’s reality program and were judged as much for their symbolic choices in tweets and headlines as for their reporting. But Politico and Axios, started by two other Politico co-founders in 2016, never quite became symbolic figures in Mr. Trump’s character universe, and generally steered away from trying to insert themselves into the self-referential theater.

Politico’s editor in chief, Matthew Kaminski, told me that he saw “a lot of American journalism heading down the road to a European model, where the leading privately owned brands, overtly or not, belong to an ideological or political ‘team’” and that Politico sees an opportunity to go in the other direction, “not to pass judgment on the motivations or outcomes, but to explain both with authority.”