I really do hope the political press collapses under its own corpulence this election cycle. The DC corps a glorified highschool cafeteria, and it's problematic for a democracy. Papers and networks and journalists will be around forever, but the current configuration simply shouldn't persist. Recent evidence:

• "Liberal" TIME columnist Joe Klein, who apparently was an "informal adviser" for Kerry/Edwards 04, repeats GOP spin. Time backs him up with a "he said/she said" response.
• Reuters covers the Republican debate last night, noting the furious "back and forth" and quoting Chuck Norris as saying it was a plus his man Huckabee because, in his words, "I don't listen to mud-slinging. I want to know what the issues are." Nice quote, Chuck. Actual attempts by the journalist to discover or probe the substance (if any) of "the issues" behind the traded accusations: none.
• Again on the Debate, CNN did a lot of branding about how this was a "debate for Republicans," and they were screening out "Democratic plant questions," etc. Fair enough, except they couldn't apparently muster the necessary due-diligence to get that right.

This is the modern media: basically overworked, or maybe incompetent, but at any rate unable to really do much in terms of "finding out what the fuck is actually going on" in the world, at a time when it seems this is pretty important. And yet they devote a lot of energy to protecting their special position in the discourse. Not really weird when you think about it -- people on their way down will often expend egregious amounts of resources on pure self-preservation, thus furthering their demise -- but no less troubling.

Sigh.