THE MEDIA MAKE THE CAMPAIGN
Milton Berle once said that criticizing tele- vision was like describing an auto acci- dent to the victims. With all due respect to Berle, one might argue that the journalistic and scholarly media analysis spawned by the vast expansion of TV coverage of politics since 1960 is more like preventive medicine.

The news media have been objects of al- most constant controversy since the late 1960s, when they were accused of turning the Ameri- can public against the Vietnam W...