While I'm Away

White House Briefing is going dark next week (back on Tuesday, Sept. 5), but you still have lots of ways to keep up with what's going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Here are a few thoughts.

Not Your Ordinary White House Correspondent

I recently updated my list of White House correspondents , which includes whenever possible links to their latest stories as well as their bios, and even -- in a growing number of cases -- their blogs.

Go read the work of someone you don't normally read. Compare and contrast.

Being a White House correspondent is in some ways a really rotten job. It involves spending a lot of time waiting around for nonevents. The briefings are very low on news. Access to the president is almost nonexistent.

But it remains a hugely important function.

And especially when so many of President Bush's utterances cry out to be put in context and for fact-checking -- rather than just stenography -- each reporter and each news organization goes about meeting that challenge in a different way. Some, to be blunt, don't do it at all. Others do it subtly. A few are more direct.

Which correspondents do you think are doing a good job? Which do you think aren't? And why? I'd be interested in hearing.

Investigative Reporters

And while every major Washington bureau should have, in addition to a White House correspondent, a White House investigative reporter -- someone who won't suffer from ruffling a few feathers, and who'll dig, dig, dig -- in the meantime, you'll have to make do with the dynamic duo of the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and the National Journal's Murray Waas .

Finding Authentic Voices

I came to the following conclusion a while ago: Bush has become such a divisive figure in American politics that when he speaks, there are some Americans who hear everything he says as the gospel -- and others who hear everything he says as (charitably) baloney. And there are remarkably few Americans in between.

Covering Bush, therefore, poses a particular challenge to traditional political reporters, who generally see their role as trying to play it down the middle. Because there may really be no middle anymore.

Put it this way: When Bush asserts something that one group of people thinks is demonstrably false, and another group thinks is demonstrably true, refusing to call it one way or the other doesn't exactly generate credibility with either group. And that's a big problem if pretty much everyone is in one group or the other.

Fox News , Rush Limbaugh and other rightward-leaning media outlets do an excellent and authentic job of conveying the Bush-as-gospel point of view.