Power has, as of a few hours ago, resigned from Obama’s campaign; there was little else to be done, given how often that campaign has framed itself as transcendent of petty name-calling. But a lot of Power’s resignation can be blamed on the media, who, in disseminating Power’s comment, made it A Thing. They could have left it alone, dismissing it, rightly, as the personal views of an accidental pundit, not worth their audiences’ time. Or they could have at least made more of a point of clarifying Power’s role in the campaign—and the fact that she has both a life and personal opinions outside of it. They could have; but they didn’t. The coverage made virtually no mention of caveats; all we heard was a white-noised refrain: Clinton is a monster, Clinton is a monster…

That kind of hero/villain coverage—born of that classic combination of stenography and dramatic appetite—is nothing new, of course. And in the current primary season alone, we’ve seen the same kind of tension between the-message-of-the-candidate and the-message-of-the-surrogate with McCain and Bob Cunningham, Clinton and Bob Johnson, and others. Those instances of tension, on their own merits, weren’t catastrophic—though the Johnson episode was particularly damaging, as it provided the spark that led to the flames of MLKgate. What is worrisome, however, is the slippery-slope aspect of each episode—with the press being the Crisco.

The particular absurdity of Monstergate provides a good opportunity to step back and consider where we ought to be drawing the line of accountability between a candidate and his or her associates. On the one hand, campaigns can’t be held responsible for everything those associates say. But neither, to add some traction to the proverbial slope, can they be entirely immune from accountability. The kind of we’ll-bite-at-anything-no-matter-who-says-it approach to campaign coverage we saw today leaves the political press open to becoming mere stooges of campaigns. (Hey, politicians! Have someone—an adviser, a friend, the boyfriend of your cousin’s accountant—say something incendiary about your rivals, and we’ll happily repeat it!) And in that, it may have created a monster.

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