A couple of weeks ago, I wrote:

Trying to get something helpful out of all this, let me just mention something. Let’s assume a well-intentioned journalist. Presumably that journalist is going to adhere to something like the standards of professional journalism in trying to deliver something approaching an impartial picture of reality. But these standards are outdated. We continue to learn more about human behavior, specifically in processing information and forming opinions. And what we learn suggests that it’s incredibly easy for ill-intentioned actors to game the media into presenting a highly distorted picture of reality. In focusing on means rather than ends, journalists become patsies for all kinds of bad actors.

This should be very embarrassing to professional journalists, but as best I can tell they see no problem with the way they do their jobs. If the ultimate effect of the work they produce is exceedingly different from what they intended it to be, they’re either ignorant of this fact, or they chalk it up to the society they cover and not the way they cover society.

Non-professionals and explicitly partisan writers are going to do what they’re going to do. Those who aspire to professionalism ought to approach their work more systematically, in an effort to understand how the job can best be done. There should be a real desire within the field to do the work better.

Today’s Post story on the recent, disgraceful McCain campaign antics, by Jonathan Weisman and Peter Slevin, begins:

Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign launched a broadside against Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, accusing him of a sexist smear, comparing his campaign to a pack of wolves on the prowl against the GOP vice presidential pick, charging that the Democratic nominee favored sex education for kindergartners, and resurrecting the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

The assault came a day before the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, when McCain and Obama are scheduled to appear together at Ground Zero during a mutually declared truce. That cease-fire is not likely to last long. With the airwaves already filling up with some of the most negative imagery of the campaign, Obama aides hinted that they would save their toughest counterpunch until after Sept. 11.

“Enough,” Obama declared yesterday while campaigning in Norfolk, Va. “I don’t care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift boat politics. Enough is enough.”

The McCain campaign, meanwhile, sought to portray itself as the victim of unfair smears and sexist attacks against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin even as it pursued its own assaults on Obama. The rhetoric was echoed yesterday on conservative talk radio, the Internet and in the House, where Republican women decried Obama’s alleged sexism.

“The Obama campaign has decided that the way to get at Sarah Palin is through personal attacks and sexist insults,” Rep. Candice S. Miller (Mich.) said on the House floor.

On a campaign conference call last night, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) lumped together Obama’s reference to a female reporter as “sweetie” last May, his decision not to choose Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) or Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his running mate, and his use of the saying “lipstick on a pig” in comments Tuesday to denounce what they call a pattern of sexism.

It goes downhill from there. I don’t know what role exactly Weisman and Slevin see themselves playing in society, but if they aspire to being something other than the pawns of a shockingly dishonest and ill-intentioned political campaign, they ought to think carefully about the way they do their jobs.