This bears on your reporting, I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented—which reinforces, I think, people’s cynicism about Washington generally. This is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalence.

—President Obama to the Associated Press, April 3, 2012

Well, who can be surprised that the President should have kicked off his reelection campaign’s spring offensive in front of an audience of journalists—or that his address took the form of a slashing partisan attack on Republicans, named and unnamed, which the assembled journalists cheered to the echo. The allegedly “cynical” media have always been the most devoted, the most undisillusionable believers in Mr. Obama’s ideas of “hope and change,” whatever they may be, and have supplied him with his most worshipful disciples since his first entry on the national stage only eight years ago. Without them, and their willingness to believe in him, and in his heroic “narrative,” he would not be president today. That he should now be asking them to go the extra mile and discard any pretense of old-fashioned journalistic balance or fairness in reporting the coming election may suggest that he is afraid of a fair fight, as indeed he has good reason to be. But the lack of any protest from the journalists involved at such a suggestion would seem to indicate that