Politico is a right-leaning media outlet which claims to publish news. This piece — Obama takes chopper for 6-mile trip bylined by Abby Phillip — is one of many of their works which not only make me nauseous but make it clear they are not really in the business of reporting news.

No, Abby Phillip, an American president using Marine One helicopter in the completion of his duties as the head of the Executive Branch is not news.

But it’s not entirely Phillip’s fault. Her editors should have done right by her by telling her they were going to spike it and to find some real news.

Her editors are also catering to the sources from whom she got her quotes by letting this piece run. Phillip should be more skeptical not only of her sources’ agenda(s), but her editors’ agendas, or she’s going to continue to be a hack.

Somewhere both Phillip and Politico editors lost sight of the fact that the government is not the only entity which may have expenses when the President of the United States drops in for a visit. Local businesses and inviduals whose day-to-day work is directly impacted by changes in routes and security checks are stakeholders, too, and they don’t appear in this piece at all.

Let me give you an example from 2004, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney made a visit to my hometown. Cheney’s security team and entourage

  • Locked down all traffic along an interstate highway for 30 miles north and south of the venue at which he was speaking for an hour before, during his visit and an hour after he’d left;
  • Locked down the local international airport located more than 30 minutes away, one which served three Fortune 100 companies, for more than three hours;
  • Locked down all the surface traffic for several miles surrounding the facility at which he spoke, including truck traffic in and out of an automotive part manufacturer’s largest, multi-plant facility in the U.S.

All for a presidential campaign stop.

What a massive time-and-expense suck to local businesses and inviduals. And nobody questioned the cost then, let alone the possibility the use of government resources might have been a Hatch Act violation — that angle might actually have been news.

Don’t even get me started on the ever-present medical retinue including the personal ambulance which accompanied Cheney that day. I can’t even begin to imagine the additional cost to taxpayers.

A six-minute chopper ride by POTUS? Meh. A bargain compared to what it would cost to businesses and individuals for a security lock-down of the area through which the POTUS’ limousine and security detail might otherwise have to drive. It’s not as if businesses and individuals have much extra cash lying around these days to suspend business long enough to let the president drive back and forth through their neighborhood.

Perhaps the real problem with young Phillip and Politico is that they don’t want to do the leg work it takes to do real reporting. It’s easier, cheaper and faster to just make a couple of phone calls and gin up something inflammatory, rather than go through the exercise of calculating all total costs to stakeholders for this particular story.

In other words, hackery pays.

[Photo: In a demonstration of "not news," Marine One ferries President George Bush for a day trip to Frederick, Md., Jan. 18, 2008. (source: jaydoubleyougee via Flickr) AP photo taken same day confirms trip.]