Like some people have a knee-jerk reaction to “the media” (and I don’t mean you!), I have a knee-jerk reaction to people calling out the media. :)

You have an excellent point about how the idea of “the capital-M media” has changed, though. Once upon a time, we really could rely on the media to help decipher events for us — they didn’t simply repeat press releases or toss information out there without doing the job of following up.

In this case, good media would have asked Dreyfuss why he was there and saved a lot of hullabaloo. Instead we get unfounded speculation and a lot of noise.

So yeah, we should be holding media more accountable: “Why do you say he was thinking that? Why do you believe he went to the rally for Reason A and not Reason B?”

But we don’t. They report, we decide.