Is there anyone like Warren on the other side of the aisle? No. Not only aren’t there any G.O.P. politicians with comparable intellectual heft, there aren’t even halfway competent intellectuals with any influence in the party. The G.O.P. doesn’t want people who think hard and look at evidence; it wants people like, say, the “economist” Stephen Moore, who slavishly reaffirm the party’s dogma, even if they can’t get basic facts straight.

Does all of this mean that Warren should be president? Certainly not — a lot of things determine whether someone will succeed in that job, and intellectual gravitas is neither necessary nor sufficient. But Warren’s achievements as a scholar/policymaker are central to her political identity, and clearly should be front and center in any reporting about her presidential bid.

But, of course, they aren’t. What I’m seeing are stories about whether she handled questions about her Native American heritage well, or whether she’s “likable.”

This kind of journalism is destructively lazy, and also has a terrible track record. I’m old enough to remember the near-universal portrayal of George W. Bush as a bluff, honest guy, despite the obvious lies underlying his policy proposals; then he took us to war on false pretenses.

Moreover, trivia-based reporting is, in practice, deeply biased — not in a conventional partisan sense, but in its implicit assumption that a politician can’t be serious unless he (and I mean he) is a conservative, or at most centrist, white male. That kind of bias, if it persists, will be a big problem for a Democratic Party that has never been more serious about policy, but has also never been more progressive and more diverse.

This bias needs to be called out — and I’m not just talking about Warren. Consider the contrast between the unearned adulation Ryan received and how long it took conventional wisdom to recognize that Nancy Pelosi was the most effective House speaker of modern times.

Again, I’m not arguing that Warren should necessarily become president. But she is what a serious policy intellectual looks and sounds like in 2019. And if our media can’t recognize that, we’re in big trouble.