Miller-Russertization

TPM prefers the term 'Tire Swing", (I can't explain what it means) when talking about the press's failure to actually report on who John McCain is.

I give it a name to honor of the two biggest frauds of the MSM: Tim Russert and Judy Miller.

A Sullivan reader sums it up nicely, whatever you want to call it:

Everything we believe about McCain--at least those of us who live too far from the Beltway to have any first-hand knowledge of its fabulous inhabitants--came to us through the glowing words of infatuated reporters.

The maverick, the last decent Republican, the reformer's reformer, the war hero--all reflect a truth that is less than complete, a construct largely created by journalists and based on little more than camaraderie (certainly not on much actual research). They were on the whole flattered into it over drinks by McCain and his surrogates.

As it turns out, even those flashes of biographical fact included in most of this reportage do not in themselves tell a true story, or at least not the whole story; the John McCain we have seen in this campaign is, alas, probably the man he has always been.

In any case, his scribes cannot expose the myth of McCain without exposing their own vanity and gullibility, their pride in having been intimates of a Very Important Man. The best of McCain, however fictional, is the best of themselves as well.