"The Washington Times and Fox News would simply decline to participate and then eke out a competitive advantage."

No they wouldn't. It is only a competitive advantage if you don't lie. If you're just a propaganda outlet, it really doesn't matter whether you're on the plane or not.

This is something that isn't addressed enough. Previous to Fox, if Republicans wanted their message out they had to go with the Post and Times like the Democrats. Thus they had to give access to make sure they could get out their news releases. Fox changed that. They can stonewall now and still be sure that Fox (and later Drudge) will get out the stories they want.

You say "you can't really do any reporting without access." Not really true. For counter-examples see I.F. Stone, McClatchy reporting on the war (their excellent reporting depended on mid level sources, not such things as flying in the candidate's jet), and the current work of Walter Pincus.

Even if you can't do really good reporting with access, you can't really do any reporting without access.

But I mean isn't this another area where the disparity is only a function of the two ideologies not using similar amounts of political capital? Obama could kick Fox off his plane just as easily as McCain kicked off Klein. And media orgs aren't powerless in this relationship either. Bill O'Reilly didn't have any problem conducting an essentially political campaign to convince Obama to come onto his show. CNN raised a stink when the McCain campaign shut out reporters from an event earlier this year. If Time wanted to, it could easily use its strong media position to retaliate against the McCain campaign.

I suspect the difference is that both Dem campaigns and the traditional 'liberal' press don't like to play politics with this stuff. But in the age of Fox, it's not clear that they really have a choice. Which makes their one-sided refusal to secure access really unfortunate -- even today, the NYT or WaPo could likely change candidate behavior by systematically and publicly refusing to cover them unless they offered fair access.

The only reporting you can't do without access is "inside scoop" reporting (or should that be "inside poop"). Voters would be better served by ever-better analysis of data from public sources. That would count as real reporting.

Put me down as another vote for the proposition that ""you can't really do any reporting without access" is an absurd statement. The candidates don't provide reporters anything other than canned crap.

Yeah, I'm going to jump on the bandwagon here as well. Isn't the whole idea of investigative journalism that you don't rely on the willingness of your subject to provide you with what you want, and instead you go out and get it for yourself, say from the many research centers and nonpartisan analysts around the beltway. When the hell did we start rely so much on what the government says in oder to judge the government's behavior?

Does Obama have any vehemently anti-Obama columnists on board his plane?
TIME magazine hasn't been kicked off, Joe Klein has. Joe Klein is an opinion columnist who is supporting Obama.
I can't think of a good reason why the McCain campaign should have to put up with him.

"This is all part of what happens when a democracy subcontracts its information function to a for-profit industry. "

I was with you until the end.

How would a non-profit or government sponsored entity be able to maintain better access while still doing critical reporting?

Wouldn't a very tightly-controlled Obama administration be the opportunity to get Fox News and the Washington Times on board? Obviously nobody's going to boycott White House press conferences, but setting-up some sort of industry-wide bargaining for 2010 and 2012 - you deny one of us basic access, we'll all deny you coverage - might be easier when the conservative outlets have their own self-interest at stake.

Jumping on the bandwagon too...

I see a few types of reporting:

1. Campaign Reporting: Essentially, he said, she said fluff, not worth the time of the major journalists out there, nor the op-ed ones either, like Klein. Maybe good for a piece on the nightly news.

2. Investigative Reporting: Your typical 60 Minutes piece. You need industry cred for people to notice you, but you can still pull off good journalism without it.

3. Straight up news. This is bombings, war plans, legislation, murders. Typical of nightly or local news.

4. The emotional piece. Reporting that tells the story from the subjects point of view. If done well, is informative, but doesn't explicitly take a side, in essence, lets the viewer come to a conclusion.

Most news outlets have a combination of these types of reporting. Therefore, the absence of Klein isn't necessarily a bad business decision, for Time or the McCain campaign.

Ezra has been righteously pasted by the commentariat. But I do want to make a weak appeal for access journalism, of the sort done by Scotty Reston in the old days.

It's okay, if done right. Access journalism, done right, is a fair bargain: the principal gets to present their own story their own way; the journalist gets to cross-examine and fact check.

This bargain only exists against a backdrop: a norm of non-access journalism done the old-fashioned way. For Washington journalism, this means a lot of meals in McDonalds with slightly disgruntled GS-14's, and a lot of document review.

Of course, modern access journalism has no backdrop, and represents no bargain. It is just stenography.

This is all part of what happens when a democracy subcontracts its information function to a for-profit industry.

So ... you oppose having an independant press? Or a for-profit press?

Would a non-profit press fare any better with the campaigns?

Yea - that last line was a doozy. What level have we dropped to when opinion writers like Ezra beg for government control of information. It's smells a lot like the campaign finance bill logic - money is the problem, government control is the answer. That's why I fear leftist thought in America. It's willing to dispense with freedoms as long as they can win. Win? We all lose with that kind of ideological myopia. We're doomed.

As for whining for Klein and the media that mimics his 'modern' reporting style - enduring the last year and a half of media chicanery has left me with no faith that we have professional/journalistic ethics in existence anywhere. I don't trust anything I hear. FOX news filled a niche because it was roundly accepted (if not admitted) that the media had become ideological organs who had traded credibility for influence. That's the price they were willing to pay, so don't lament the consequences, just celebrate the fact that Americans have learned that all news is opinion, and no one is to be trusted. That's the first step in taking back control.

There's a disconnect here, caused (I suspect) by a semantic slip in Ezra's post. You can do good journalism without access, as several have noted. But you can't do it without information, which was the real point of the post (and the behavior of which the McCan campaign is guilty).

One fun aspect of this is the asymmetric-information nature of the McCain position. If McCain's/Palin's health was fine, they should be happy to release it. If it's not, they should not - but be happy to tell you that the health of both candidates is just dandy, which seems to be the course they've chosen.

kaybeel - To answer your question, yes, the Obama campaign has in fact barred reporters. Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker was denied a seat on the Obama plane after the wrote an article that they considered unflattering.

"Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker was denied a seat on the Obama plane after [he] wrote an article that they considered unflattering."

That's factually accurate, but the implied cause-and-effect is questionable. When Obama took his European trip, the airplane had room for 40 journalists, and over 200 applied. If you think that Ryan Lizza should have been one of the 40 allowed on the plane, which journalist do you think that the Obama campaign should have turned away to make room for him?