TNR takes a look at how the press is holding up at the end of the long campaign season:

Veterans point out that despite the length of this race, the reporters' relationships to the candidates and to each other aren't nearly as toxic as they had been in previous years. There's been little of the high school cliquishness that plagued the Kerry press corps, and reporters don't seem to loathe McCain or Obama the way they loathed Gore--who refused to hold a press conference for upwards of 60 days--in 2000.

The sympathetic article goes on and on about how long the campaign has been and how difficult it's been to cover. And how there aren't any interesting articles to write any more. (Y'think?)

But journalists get very little sympathy from us. We wrote nearly 20 months ago that the press was going way overboard with its breathless, celebrity-based campaign coverage and that the campaign, as presented by the press, was going to be unbearably long.

But that's the beast the mainstream media desperately wanted to build (because campaigns now double as entertainment content/programming) and that's the beast that had to be fed. So let's not whine about the process now.

BTW, loved the suggestion that the press loathed Gore because he wouldn't hold a press conference. Whatever you say TNR. (Fact: The press loathed Gore on the campaign trail 14 months before he ever pulled back on press conferences.)