This sort of thing is exactly what depressed me so much about working on the city mayoral campaign. The local media decided who they wanted to win, and aimed their coverage accordingly. The point is not even who should have won, but rather that the voters should be the ones to decide.

That said, I was not all that surprised to read last week that the City Hall bureau chief for one of the local papers - someone who refused to use anything negative about our opponent - had resigned to work as his speechwriter in the new administration. And no one raised a single eyebrow.

Doesn’t that say something? We have laws that prevent politicians from going straight to work for businesses they regulated, but we count on the “integrity” of the media in similar situations. Guess it’s time for another blogger ethics conference!

At The New Republic’s blog, Jason Zengerle confesses what is and has long been too obvious to require much proof — the media is uncontrollably in love with John McCain. And Zengerle’s reason why this is so is equally unsurprising: McCain gives them unfettered access, so they love him. Everything is about them, and whichever politician flatters and charms these adolescent, coddled narcissists is the recipient of their uncritical love (that explains much, though not all, of their profound failure in covering the Bush campaigns and administration). Zengerle also says:

Speaking of McCain and the media, I was at a dinner tonight with various political reporters who are up here to cover the happenings, and it was pretty funny how giddy/relieved they were at the prospect of a McCain-Obama general election campaign, as opposed to, say, a Romney-Clinton one. Suddenly, the next 11 months of their lives look a whole lot more enjoyable.

Those preferences — all based in their own petty personal desires — couldn’t be more obvious in the media narrative spewing forth. Dancing around like munchkins in Oz, they proclaim that the wicked Clinton witch is dead and McCain is surging with a miraculous, glorious comeback.

Leave aside whether any of that is true. Why are predictions and speculation even part of the job of a political reporter at all? One can see why opinionists and pundits might dabble in that sort of predictive analysis, but why do “reporters” covering these campaigns consider it their province to guess about which candidates are going to win and lose, as opposed to, say, reporting on what they argue, what their claims are, the truth of their positions, etc. etc.?

Aside from the fact that these endless prediction games completely overwhelm any substantive discussions, their guesses — which are really wishes — are almost always dreadfully wrong and plainly designed to advance their concealed agenda for which candidates they like and dislike. Why is any of that something that reporters ought to be doing at all? Is there any distinction between what a “reporter” does and what a “pundit” does covering this campaign? There doesn’t seem to be any.

[...] But I’m not focusing on the accuracy of horse-race predictions here, but instead, on the fact that the traveling press corps endlessly imposes its own narrative on the election, thereby completely excluding from all coverage plainly credible candidates they dislike (such as Edwards) while breathlessly touting the prospects of the candidates of whom they are enamored. Their predictions (i.e., preferences and love affairs) so plainly drive their press coverage — the candidates they love are lauded as likely winners while the ones they hate are ignored or depicted as collapsing — which in turn influences the election in the direction they want, making their predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies.

It’s just all a completely inappropriate role for political reporters to play, yet it composes virtually the entirety of their election coverage. Go read Time or The New Republic or The Politico or The Washington Post and see if you can find any examples of straight factual reporting about the remaining candidates, their positions, anything substantive — rather than endless, group-think gossip about tactics and winning/losing predictions. It basically doesn’t exist (here’s an interview Ana Marie Cox conducted with John McCain yesterday where she tried to press him on his comment that we should remain in Iraq for 100 years — notable because it’s so rare to find any questions of this type).

I realize none of this is a revelation. But it’s still astonishing how extreme it is. The point isn’t just that this empty chatter squeezes out anything more meaningful — it does — but that it completely drives voter perceptions and controls the ability of candidates to be heard.