Defending the press corps?

Jonathan Stein makes a decent point or two in his response to Matt Taibi's latest assault on campaign coverage and the press corps more generally. But, as an avowed skeptic, I think the reason there's room to defend the press corps in this instance is that this particular Taibi complaint isn't a very strong one.

What we see on the Democratic side are three different candidates each touting a vision of this country's future that's all but indistinguishable from the others'. That point's been basically settled. So of course there's going to be a lot of posturing (and then news reporting) about the candidates' avenues of approach to that future. In fact, that's the proper metric to examine, and the media has done a decent job of it.

But there's so much more ginned up bullshit--about haircuts and cocaine use and weeping--that the change mantras have all but drowned out of the narrative. It's now a question of whether Obama's cocaine use will hurt him more than Hillary's crying will hurt her, or whether both will get a boost for humanizing themselves, or whether a Kucinich-sighted UFO will abduct John Edwards and turn him into an inevitable Manchurian candidate. All the while, John McCain can lose, but still win; he can win narrowly, but be credited with an early-round KO, or he can flip-flop whimsically, but it doesn't matter because he's stuck within the steel-framed confines of the Straight Talk express.

And, as such, the press corps is ruining the country.

Then Jonathan adds this:

The press will write a story about Obama's economic stimulus package the day after it comes out, and then it can't write about it anymore. There's nothing new to be said. And if you're on the trail, the candidates say the same things over and over, so after you've written about the thoughts on education, immigration, Iraq, etc. that Obama is willing to reveal in his stump speech, you can't write them any more.

Which I think is substantially wrong. In fact, earlier in the year a bunch of non-campaign reporters and journalists proved this is wrong. They insisted--repeatedly--that Barack Obama wasn't exactly being honest about the universality of his care plan, it trickled up to the campaign corps, and in the end he was basically forced to concede the point. But that's not really a victory for the horse-racers. After all, there have been similar efforts by the same crew of wonks to make the point that at just about every stump speech he's ever made, Rudy Giuliani has lied about the relationship between tax rates and government revenue.

But that effort's been pretty ineffective. Because, of course, campaign reporters barely made a squeak about it. Which is all to say that it's impossible to defend anything, if doing so requires finding the exception that proves the rule.