Today's Politico opus about the White House press corps' frustration with the Obama administration is, as these things tend to be, quite revealing about the media. And, as tends to be the case, what's missing from the sprawling assessment is as revealing as what's included.

Of note: in a 3,786 word article about “why reporters are down on Obama,” there is no mention of the Obama administration giving reporters misleading or inaccurate information. Instead, the complaints are about whether press secretary Robert Gibbs shows up for social events and which reporters get to be in the press pool and in which circumstances the President takes their questions.

Not that those complaints are completely irrelevant. But after an administration that misled the media about things like war, it's a little quaint that reporters are so upset when a press secretary doesn't show up for what even Politico acknowledges was a “trivial social engagement.”

Perhaps you think it unfair of me to invoke the Bush administration lying to the media in discussing the relationship between reporters and the Obama administration. But it isn't me -- It's the White House press corps that says its relationship with the Obama administration is as bad as it ever was with the Bush administration:

President Obama and the media actually have a surprisingly hostile relationship - as contentious on a day-to-day basis as any between press and president in the last decade, reporters who cover the White House say.

So ... yeah. To the White House press corps, not getting your calls returned -- or seeing a competitor get a scoop -- is as bad as this, for example.

At every step, the quality of the journalism produced by the White House press corps is treated as irrelevant. For example, Politico reports:

Last year, Times reporter Helene Cooper was the target of a fusillade of complaints from Obama staffers and was for a time essentially frozen out by the administration, several colleagues said. Recently, a story by Sanger and Thom Shanker about an Iran policy memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates received a public drubbing from Gibbs.

Gibbs said he recalled complaints about a story Cooper wrote from Japan that “had a bent nobody else's story had. The bent was also wrong.”

Well, what did Cooper report? Was it accurate and fair? Those questions are key to determining whether the White House treated Cooper shabbily -- or whether it had a justified reaction to deeply flawed reporting. And yet Politico makes absolutely no attempt to answer those questions; gives no indication that it even recognizes that the questions might matter. It takes two sides to maintain an amicable relationship, but Politico behaves as though responsibility for doing so lies solely with the White House.

Likewise, Politico gives us three paragraphs about complaints that the Obama administration has “back-benched” the Wall Street Journal -- without ever noting that since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, it has lurched to the Right. That should be worth noting, shouldn't it? Nobody expects the President to treat the American Spectator the way he treats CNN, right? So the Journal's move towards the Spectator should probably be included in any discussion of the White House's treatment of the paper.

Then there's this:

“These are people who came in with every reporter giving them the benefit of the doubt,” said another reporter who regularly covers the White House. “They've lost all that goodwill.”

I have no doubt that many reporters believe this is true, but it simply is not.