CNN is planning to challenge the AP with their own news wire service. Isn’t that a lot like, on the day the first Model T hit the streets, a businessman turns to the other and says “I’m going to make a better horse drawn carriage and I’ll beat that automobile!” The news media is sort of in that place film was at the introduction of TV, coming up with all sorts of gimmicks like 3D and Smell-o-vision. Industries never like to acknowledge when new technology has effectively re-worked the way they do business — and they so often react in the dumbest way possible.

The biggest obstacle to a national conversation in the election this fall will be the way in which the mainstream media will run interference for John McCain. They are his base in a way in which the conservative movement never has nor will be. In this instance, one of the attendees at McCain’s barbecue with the press, Libby Quaid, has serviced the “maverick” with a love note disguised as an AP story:

John McCain traveled like a man of the people Friday morning, riding an Amtrak train to Philadelphia after a late night of voting in Washington.

…

McCain, accompanied by a campaign aide, was left alone by the public as he sat in the first-class car for much of the 1 1/2 hour trip.

Do you know many “men of the people” who ride first class? I don’t. But if you’re a shill at the AP, I guess you do. I wonder what McCain put in that meat?