As much as it physically pains me to break ranks with Ezra, blaming the ratings-hungry media for the recently disgraceful tenor of McCain’s campaign is just kind of lazy.

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.

The media can’t force John McCain to go heinously negative any more than it can refuse to cover him if he doesn’t. McCain is in a two-man race for the American presidency and runs no more risk of being excluded from the network news than the DOW runs of being excluded from the WSJ. I think Ezra represents himself better on Blogging Heads than he did in text and am more than ready to agree with him that the mainstream media has done “a terrible fucking job” with this election, but it still seems to me that he was somehow wrongfully taken in by Brian Rogers’ whining. Though the quality of coverage has been indisputably bad, McCain has never been denied his turn at the soapbox. Reporters have, if anything, historically been too kind to every Democrat’s former-favorite Republican. McCain as do-gooder media wallflower is an entirely ridiculous image.

All that said, what really gets me about this post, and about a lot of similar rhetoric I’ve been hearing around Harvard, is the overt assumption that the media and not the candidates themselves should be ultimately responsible for the quality of campaign discourse. Since when do we passively expect that American presidential candidates will of necessity run as morally bankrupt a campaign as Mother Media will allow them to? How can we even begin to excuse a man who has chosen to stand out from amongst our ranks as a national exemplar and then gone on to exhibit behavior we wouldn’t tolerate out of middle-schoolers? I, for one, do not excuse him or any politician on either side of the aisle who chooses to play political Limbo (How low can they go? Pretty damn low). While I willingly admit outrage over the ever-waning presence of American journalistic integrity, it is much easier for me to excuse depravity in the guys getting paid by media conglomerates than it is for me to excuse it in the guys getting paid by the American people.