Democratic Pollster Excoriates Press for Going Easy on White House

Pat Caddell says journalists have become partisan "active participants"

I think we're at the most dangerous time in our political history in terms of the balance of power in the role that the media plays in whether or not we maintain a free democracy or not.  You know, when I first started in politics – and for a long time before that – everyone on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, despised the press commonly, because they were SOBs to everybody.  Which is exactly what they should be.  They were unrelenting.  Whatever the biases were, they were essentially equal-opportunity people.

That changed in 1980.

There are a lot of reasons for it. It changed—an important point in the Dukakis-Bush election, when the press literally was trying to get Dukakis elected by ignoring what was happening in Massachusetts, with a candidate who was running on the platform of "He will do for America what he did for Massachusetts"—while they were on the verge of bankruptcy.