Welcome back to the “House of Cards” recap where Ashley Parker and David Carr chat about the media and political dimensions of the show. This week, episode four is under the microscope. You can catch up on recaps of episode one, two or three, as well, but please know spoilers are everywhere, so watch first, then read.

Episode Four
Representative Frank Underwood organizes a coup — though not quite the expected one — to get his education bill one step closer to passage. He asks Representative Frank Russo for yet another favor. Zoe Barnes is offered the job covering the White House for her newspaper and turns it down — and she and Frank finally officially begin their affair.

Parker: And finally, in Episode Four, we find Zoe Barnes and Frank Underwood where we knew they were headed all along: With Frank standing in Zoe’s rag-tag apartment, surveying her in a little black dress amid the dark, dank mess (“Do your parents know you live like this?” he asks), about to embark on what we imagine will ultimately be a mutually-destructive affair.

I still maintain that no young, up-and-coming female reporter I currently know would sleep with a congressman she was covering. But what interested me more this episode from a journalistic standpoint were some of the grand pronouncements made about our craft. When Zoe’s editor, Tom Hammerschmidt, first complains to the Katherine Graham editor figure that Ms. Barnes has not been obeying his orders, she replies, “Tom, we don’t need people who follow the rules. We need personalities.” This curt directive seems to lead to the next plot point, in which Tom offers his truculent charge the White House beat, “promoting” that job’s current inhabitant to Midwest bureau chief.

“People usually don’t have to think about it when they’re offered the White House,” he says, not totally inaccurately, when Zoe asks for a few days to consider the gig.

“The White House is where news goes to die,” she retorts, not totally inaccurately.

The White House is a notoriously tough gig. Many “scoops” are handed to chosen reporters, with true news rarely trickling out of the closed spigot that is the White House press office. The Bush administration was bad, the Obama administration is bad, and I’m sure a Romney administration would have been no different. That’s not to say the White House doesn’t generate real and important news, and our White House team does a terrific job of covering it. But it’s not an easy job to do.

With that said, I can think of few reporters — especially few young, up-and-coming reporters whose perpetual strivings seems to be their defining feature, as is the case with Zoe — who would turn down the job. But when she does just that, her editor is beside himself and calls her self-entitled and a name that we can’t print here.

“Call me whatever you want, “she warns him, just before sending his verbal missive out to the world from her smart phone, “but remember, these days, when you’re talking to one person, you’re talking to 1,000.”

So, David, how did these pronouncements land on you? Do we really need less rule-following reporters and more personalities? Is the White House where news goes to die, and if it is, does that make is a less attractive target for an ambitious journalist? And when it’s just you and me talking, are we really talking to thousands?

Carr: My answers in order: Further down the food chain, personality may help you stick above the clutter, but the people who rule big beats are the ones who get the stories, not a high Q-rating. Doing stand-ups on the White House lawn or filing from the press room there may not be the most action-packed assignment, but covering a man who is arguably the most powerful one on earth is never going to be beside the point.

And just me and you talking, when it’s you and me talking it should be just that, without social media coming along for the ride. Taking shop talk to Twitter or elsewhere is Just. Not. Done. And threatening an editor with a suddenly weaponized cell phone is probably not a great long-term professional play.

In terms of the reporter and the Congressman crossing the line, I think it probably is not the best choice even in dramatic terms. It’s spicy, yes, but pretty far fetched. I had a couple of journalists over to my house for dinner over the weekend — including Ta-Nehesi Coates of The Atlantic and Brendan Koerner of Wired — and we spent probably too much time talking about the show. And we talked about how much more interesting it would have been for Zoe and Frank to play each other along rather than actually go there. Maybe we don’t understand television as well as the people who made “House of Cards,” but there’s something so crassly transactional in what they are up to, it clanks.

Generally, “House of Cards” gets so many things right — the grubby alliance of money and politics, staffers who see everything in terms of numbers, the blatant horse-trading — than I am surprised that the journalism stuff seems to miss the mark. Perhaps I am far too cynical about politics and too idealistic about our craft to be a proper judge.

The folks at our house spent a long time picking the show apart and then pivoted immediately to how quickly they binged on the series and when the second season will come out, so perhaps the people behind the show know exactly what they are doing. Storytelling aimed at the masses often engages in tropes and caricatures to keep things moving and keep people interested.

Parker: Well, you’ve stumbled onto part of the brilliance of “House of Cards.” In D.C., especially, the conversation often seems to turn on the stultifying where-do-you-work, what-do-you-do questions.

But as Politico’s Reid Epstein pointed out to me the other night — over drinks, at a bar, where we were, naturally, talking “House of Cards” with a group of journalists and Hill types — the show has become the new D.C. social crutch, a pick-up line of sorts that guarantees ready-made conversation. Instead of all kinds of awkward and often ineffective gambits, now everyone has a safe place to start a conversation with a stranger: “So what episode of ‘House of Cards’ are you on?” As you wrote previously, the show may have let some of the water leak out of the cooler, but I cannot tell you the number of folks inside the beltway who have embraced “House of Cards” as a liberating way to (yet again) talk about work, without really talking about work.

Carr: Well, I’m all for something, anything that can help wonks relate to each other. Is there anything more painful than watching two badge-wearing citizens of the Beltway trying to engage in normal social discourse? Just kidding, Ashley. I know D.C. has gotten so much hipper and more fun since I used to work there. And now it has its very own show to call its own, or at least its very own show to nitpick and complain about even as the next version is queued up for viewing.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/the-new-beltway-icebreaker-what-episode-of-house-of-cards-are-you-on/?partner=rss&emc=rss