General Discussion

Though whether a lot of these horse-race polls are really "news" is questionable as well... but that's a different argument.

These papers do occasionally run features that go into policy with some depth. But as you say, policy doesn't change much day-to-day. If they run a feature on health care policy one day, they're obviously not going to run it again the next day. They probably won't run another until there's some new major public policy debate about it. What do people expect of a daily newspaper? Mainly they are the proverbial first draft of history. You can't blame them for not being great at something they weren't designed to be in the first place. There's a reason there's the saying that nothing is as useless as yesterday's newspaper.

Luckily we have the internet, where you can find all the policy detail you want... including archives of the policy pieces these papers do occasionally do. It may not be perfect either, but that's not the fault of the Times or the Post. This is blaming them for a not solving a problem they weren't designed to solve.