Sheesh. Compare that tone of dogmatic, defensive devotion to what we saw in Keith Olbermann’s recent interview with Obama. Yes, Olbermann’s interview was softer than it could have been—but at least its tone was sober. At least Olbermann occasionally challenged the senator on his answers; at least he asked follow-up questions; at least the goal of his interview seemed to be, you know, the extraction of information from the candidate.

But Hannity wasn’t, in the end, seeking information. He was seeking spin. He wasn’t lobbing journalistic softballs at Palin; he was forfeiting the whole game.

There has been precious little reaction to the Hannity interview in the mainstream media today. Which is partially because the Palin Novelty is wearing off, but partially because the interview was conducted by Sean Hannity. Many critics and commentators tend to dismiss pundits like Hannity and Olbermann and their ilk as journalistic Crisco: flabby, bloviating blobs too slippery to adhere to rigid journalistic standards. I see the pragmatism of their assumptions (square pegs, round holes, all that), but I’d argue that it is precisely that mindset of defeatism that people who care about journalism must try to defeat.

The simpering smugness Hannity demonstrated last night is both a specimen and a symptom of the above-the-law mentality we see so often in politicians and, increasingly, the press—one that, at its worst, treats the truth as inconsequential. It’s the same mindset that leads members of the McCain campaign to keep repeating the “thanks but no thanks” line when discussing the Bridge to Nowhere—despite the fact that, as has been documented again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, that line is a lie.

We’re giving those partisan pundits a free pass when we allow them to abdicate journalistic responsibility. And we’re also tacitly approving their spin-uber-alles mentality—that cynical and destructive mindset that has hijacked so much of our discourse. Though we might think we’re upholding journalistic tradition by ignoring those who so clearly thwart that tradition, we’re not. On the contrary, we critics enable these figures expressly by withholding our criticism of them. We’re defining the standards of journalism so narrowly as to exclude even highly influential outliers—and, in doing so, we’re providing them with a journalistic frontier in which they can conduct their gun fights and bar brawls and the like with whimsical abandon. And with an audience, often, of millions.

“Now Thursday night, by the way,” Hannity noted as he closed last night’s segment,

I’m going to bring you part two of Governor Palin and our interview here. Now, well, we’ll find out if she thinks the media is trying to elect Barack Obama, her strategy for repairing our relationships abroad and her thoughts on the mini army that’s been sent to Alaska to look into her personal life.

In other words: a valid—and urgent—topic of inquiry, sandwiched between a piece of spin and another of distortion. If Gibson had said something like that in his interview, he’d be a laughingstock. But who’s holding Hannity accountable? We can say that applying journalistic standards to people who clearly aren’t interested in being journalists is worth neither the breath nor the ink required in the effort. But we’d be wrong. It’s the people who fancy themselves above the law who create the need for laws in the first place. And it’s the people who care about journalism’s standards who should be stepping up to enforce them.

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