If there’s one thing most people can agree on these days it’s that political reporting has gone to the dogs. Even some of my colleagues subscribe to this view. In a Daily Comment last week, George Packer had a rip at the reporters covering the Republican primaries, lamenting that they no longer cover real issues but merely treat politics as light entertainment. George was particularly exercised about the campaign posse’s failure to dwell on Rick Santorum’s comment in Iowa that President Obama is engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.” George wrote, “Once demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.”

This sounds kind of serious. Maybe those tweet-happy, trivia-obsessed McMuffins really are letting down the profession and the country, turning Presidential politics into a game show. And since I’m sitting here waiting to find out how the horse race in New Hampshire turns out, rather than doing some research into the historical demonization of African-American political leaders, or whether Mitt Romney’s get-tough approach to China is credible from a game-theoretical perspective, maybe I’m guilty of the same thing.

But wait a minute. Over breakfast this morning, I read the front section of the Times, which contains almost four full pages of political coverage, much of it tied to today’s New Hampshire primary. There were reports on how Romney has spent years cultivating local political leaders, on how the campaigns are already blanketing the airwaves in South Carolina, and a particularly interesting story on the relationship between Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino billionaire and fervent Zionist, who has just donated five million dollars to a Super PAC tied to the Georgian. Sitting down at my desk, I picked up an investigative report from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that I had printed out. It examined the history of seventy-seven businesses that Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old firm, invested in between 1984 and 1999, and revealed that more than one in five of them (twenty-two per cent) had filed for bankruptcy.

To my eyes, anyway, these were all examples of serious political journalism: well reported, clearly edited, and soberly presented. And today is nothing special. On any other morning, I could pick out at least three or four similarly informative articles, some of which would probably come from less traditional news sources. Only yesterday, I was reading another piece about Romney’s time at Bain, which I learned about on Twitter. It came from BuzzFeed, a fast-growing news site that recently hired Ben Smith, a former columnist at Politico and the Daily News, as its editor-in-chief.

In fact, having recently returned to writing about politics after a long absence, I am struck daily by the range and depth of the information on offer. When I first started reporting from Washington, in 1988, I used to stand by the A.P. and Reuters ticker-tape machines waiting for them to spew out the latest news from the White House or the State Department. These days, sites like Politico, the Huffington Post, and nytimes.com provide real-time coverage of virtually anything that is happening. and the material that forms the basis of their reports is often available directly from the Web sites of government departments and other organizations. If I want to find out which individuals or corporations have contributed most to Romney’s campaign, I can go to OpenSecrets.org, a Web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics. Indeed, the Center itself puts out some good news stories. Last week, it reported that the Tea Party Republicans in Congress are, on average, wealthier than other Republican members of Congress, which is hardly what you might expect.

I would offer the perhaps heretical suggestion that political journalism, far from having gone into a terminal decline, is in better shape now than it was back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, which some hold up as a golden age. Back then, the American media world was a cozy oligopoly, and, like all oligopolies, it limited its output. On television, the three networks provided half an hour of evening news, much of it unrelated to politics, and, from 1980 onwards, one decent late-night news show: ABC Nightline. In print, the big metropolitan papers and the three newsweeklies dominated things, largely to the exclusion of other players.

To be sure, the quasi-monopolies produced some first-rate political journalism, but they also produced a lot of junk: glorified stenography, hagiographies disguised as inside accounts, and “authoritative” books as thick as doorsteps that no living soul could read from start to finish. Much of the truly memorable political writing came from people outside the media-industry power structure, such as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. (Even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it shouldn’t be forgotten, weren’t members of the White House press corps when they started writing about Watergate. They were on the Washington Post’s Metro desk.)

To describe run-of-the-mill political coverage thirty or forty years ago as being about “what is true, what is important,” which is what George says it should be about, would be to adopt a rosy-tinted view of history. When Ronald Reagan came to power, the so-called “liberal press” proved so supine that the writer Mark Hertsgaard titled his account of the media and the White House “On Bended Knee.” (George dates the trivialization of political reporting to the nineteen-eighties, so we aren’t necessarily in disagreement on this one.) It would also be a big stretch to say that political reporters back then were less interested in the horse race, and kept their eyes fixed on the higher thing. (If you doubt me on this one, go and pick out your dog-eared copy of “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” or “The Boys on the Bus,” both of which are devoted to the 1972 campaign.)

During the past fifteen years, the media oligopoly has been replaced by a free-for-all on the Internet. A blizzard of information can confuse rather than enlighten, of course, but there is hardly a shortage of analyzers and filterers. Publications like the Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post provide a lot more signed columns and “news analysis” pieces than they used to do—too many, IMHO. For those who prefer their instruction in edible online chunks, there are bloggers of every description, many of them diligent to the point of exhaustion. Take my old sparring partner Andrew Sullivan. If you have been following him over the past couple of weeks, you will have been directed to all variety of attacks on Santorum—many from the right.

But what about other forms of political journalism: investigative reporting, big issues pieces, and long-form narratives? Like the giant panda and the polar bear, they defy predictions of their extinction, not least in the pages of my own magazine. But elsewhere, too. I am currently looking forward to reading Mark Lilla’s piece on the conservative mind in the New York Review and Adam Davidson’ article on reviving the American economy in The Atlantic. On Internet sites, it is certainly true, the appetite for long pieces, such as this one, is smaller. But investigations and narratives are ongoing at online news operations. It was old-fashioned legwork by reporters from Politico that brought down Herman Cain, and it was Bloomberg Markets Magazine, part of Bloomberg News, that spent months putting together information about exactly how much money the Federal Reserve expended during 2008 and 2009 to rescue the financial system, and where it went. Even before the first vote has been cast, we already have at least two book-length accounts of the 2012 campaign in the form of e-books: one from Politico and Random House, and another from Real Clear Politics and Crown.