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I've been trying to make this point throughout the week, but Paul Waldman is pithier than I am.
Reporters will choose to write about flag pins. They will choose to write about whether some catastrophic, heretofore hidden character flaw has been revealed by a comment a candidate made, or by a comment somebody who knows the candidate made. They are not merely conduits for the campaign's discourse, they create the campaign's discourse, as much as the candidates themselves. Ah, but didn't Hillary Clinton criticize Barack Obama over his "bitter" comments? Doesn't that justify a week of relentless, repetitive discussion? Yes, she did (as he has criticized her before on matters equally trivial). But on that day, she probably held half a dozen campaign events and talked about a hundred different things. Had reporters wanted, they could have written stories about what she said about health care, the economy, Iraq, or just about anything else. They chose instead to write about this. The time is long past for them to stop pretending they have nothing to do with how trivial a campaign becomes.On some level, the media gets this -- it's the essential conflict of interest that runs like the San Andreas fault line right through the center of the profession. But because they haven't figured out a way to it, they by and large refuse to talk about it, because if you talk about it, then it's real, and you're both open to the criticism and obligated to figure out a transparent fix.
