Which is worse:  the continued lack of skepticism and fawning attention to access?  Or repetition of right-wing blast faxes? Both are lazy shorthand for reporters who fail to question the manipulative intent of those who seek to use them.

Ta-Nehsi points out the obvious:

John McCain has run a standard Republican identity politics campaign, and levied the sort of personal attacks that a lot of reporters probably thought he never would. I don’t fault McCain for that. He’s a politician trying to win. I fault reporters for buying his line and then selling it to the rest of the world. Worse, it still hasn’t occurred to them their gullibility is almost certainly intimately linked to the very thing they most miss — access.

…I don’t know where this idea comes from that reporters are supposed to be chummy with the people they cover. The reporter is trying to get to what she sees as the essential narrative. The candidate is trying to get the reporter to buy the narrative they like. These two perspectives are opposed to each other….

Access courting coupled with manipulative narrative seeding saturated the Libby trial, most powerfully during Cathie Martin’s testimony blandly detailing manipulation strategery of the Bushies.  Sitting in that courtroom, watching assembled journalists taking notes, I kept thinking such a public shaming must have been rough. For some, it was — and others?  Totally jaded.

Ta-Nehsi’s piece brought to mind something Froomkin wrote about I.F. Stone:

On the issue of access…longtime Washington reporter Marvin Kalb [said] of Stone: "He didn’t care what the ‘senior officials’ said on ‘deep background,’ because I think he assumed they were lying or misleading the press in any case." Myra quotes Stone himself as saying: "You cannot get intimate with officials and maintain your independence." Whether they were "good guys" or "bad guys" was incidental to him. "They’ll use you." For Stone, an interview was not an occasion to get spun, but an opportunity to confront an official with facts. He deplored "baby questions."

And that’s really it, isn’t it? You are either there to do the job – or to accumulate cocktail weenie invites.  Or pass around the donuts.  If Obama wins this election, do we switch back to Clinton Rules?

Because if Barbara West is any indication, I’d say it will be Wurlitzer blast fax ahoy…

(YouTube — blast fax public service warning via Office Space.)