Oh, please! Howard Kurtz is on the Hugh Hewitt show arguing that reporters are obligated to give more coverage to Cruz Bustamonte and Tom McClintock instead of gaggling around Arnold. Since when have reporters be obligated to do anything? They can even get the facts straight a lot of the time. They writhe in agony over the likes of Jayson Blair and shrug off the overstating of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum by about 170,000%. Yet Kurtz is able to work up real (apparently) indignation that reporters are paying too much attention to the movie star instead his bland opponents. Journalistic ethics is a lot like atheist ethics, it changes with every breeze from the coasts. When has the media ever had any real ethical standard? It is, after all, a business, and generally still obeys the market, except when it obeys the pretentions of a liberal elite by allowing only the likeminded to advance in the business. That's why so many lefties are incensed at the success of Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel and others in the same mold. They have lost power in Congress and the presidency and they see their lock on control of the commentariat weakening. so naturally their resort is to . . . ethics?

Actually, yes, because in the liberal universe, ethics are not the unchanging standards most of us them them to be. They're whatever the New York Times and the WaPo's editorial pages say they are, and that means that the interests of the Democrat Party come first.