Firstly, I just have to confess: I'm not an issue snob. I don't want more talk. I want a mother-fu*@in' massive tornado just to rip institutions like TV and newspaper media into stinking rubble. I want a cross between the Gracchi and Diocletian to ass-fu*@ all the usual suspects and give the empire another 150 years.

With that said, Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat do an excellent job of not trivializing how disappointing, from a standard focus on parties and personalities, media coverage is in 2008. Klein puts the blame squarely where it belongs.

None of this, of course, absolves McCain of what he has done. He has sacrificed his honor and dignity with astonishing enthusiasm. He has become much worse than "just another politician." He is a politician who was once more than that, and used that reputation to go lower than the rest. But the fact remains that he wouldn't be doing this, that no one would do this, if the media ignored or censured the behavior. If lies were covered as lies and an allergy to substance was treated as evidence of an unfitness to govern, the tenor of campaigns would lift. These are, at the end of the day, rational beasts, and they hunger for good coverage. THe McCain campaign has found its best coverage comes from its worst campaigning. And so they are following the incentive structure laid out by the media.

Douthat attacks McCain more directly.

John McCain's attempt to run a "different kind of campaign" earlier in the year was largely a matter of symbolism and procedure rather than substance, and to a certain extent the media gave it the treatment it deserved. McCain went to places Republicans don't usually go, and proposed a series of informal debates that represented a departure from what presidential candidates usually do ... but when it came to those policy speeches, he didn't seem interested in taking big risks or making hard choices, and this no doubt affected how (and how often) the press covered his campaign. In their first races for the presidency, both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton promised to take their parties in new directions, and both offered substance to back these promises up; the press treated them like new-model candidates because there was actually good reason to think that they were. McCain, by contrast, has promised to take his party in a new direction, but the centerpiece of his reform agenda is ... cutting earmarks. Maybe that's a laudable goal, but "compassionate conservatism" or "ending welfare as we know it" it sure isn't, and you can't fool reporters into thinking that it is. The press is allergic to policy detail, but they do respond, at least to some extent, to innovation and unconventional proposals - and if McCain's agenda had been bolder, his attempt to run a more high-minded campaign in the early going might have earned him more press coverage than he ended up receiving. Any politician can claim to be running as a new kind of a candidate - but unless you're Barack Obama, who wears his newness in his name and on his skin, you need to prove it, and then prove it again, before the media will take you seriously.

Klein is right: 'This is what we have come to!'

Cross-Posted at PoliGazette

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