The basic integrity and decency of our high officeholders - and those who would seek high office - is about as paramount an issue for our country as can be imagined. If the media cannot realize that the McCain campaign's profound and uninterrupted series of bald-faced lies have now become the central story of this race, then the media itself shares responsibility for the national calamity it tempts as a result.
A democracy of any kind depends on its voting citizens having the information necessary to make rational choices. Our elections - indeed, the very foundations of the United States of America itself - are completely meaningless if the electorate is deliberately deceived on the most salient topics of those elections. The core function of a free press as imagined by the Founders so long ago, and as enshrined in our Constitution, was to provide a bulwark against - not a conduit for - the kinds of ignorance and deception that so easily threaten the fundamental workings of our republic.
We can't afford to wait for the media to start doing its job and meaningfully report on the single most important issue of this election: John McCain's intense, comprehensive, and unrelenting campaign against the truth. Spread this video far and wide (I can't, for the life of me, get DailyKos to embed the video, so here's the link.)
http://www.youtube.com/...
ADDENDUM:
As many others have noted, the establishment media is indeed finally beginning to call out - with varying degrees of bluntness - the McCain campaign's lies. However, they are still mainly doing this only on a limited, individual basis. The new emphasis that we must encourage and pressure the media to adopt is not just about the McCain campaign's consistent willingness to blatantly lie about the most salient issues of the race, but also what this execrable behavior means for the election and the future of the country.
All the elements of a rather nasty convergence of anti-McCain themes are beginning to materialize, and the media just needs to be pushed to recognize the larger pattern: that McCain clearly understands that he is much more like Bush and the standard Republican Party than people would accept if they were fully aware of it; that he recognizes that Obama has made a personal "brand" of the winning message of change; that McCain sees rampant, serial deception about his opponent and his own agenda as the only way to win in spite of these forces; and, finally, that this deeply dishonest and cynical behavior directly contradicts McCain's only successful trademark of straightforwardness and substance, and only further reveals McCain as nearly indistinguishable from Bush.
This is a Category 5 hurricane of themes forming on our political coastline. The only question now is whether the media will report on this approaching disaster before it hits, thereby allowing people to protect themselves from it, or will the media instead ignore it until it is too late, then spend the ensuing months and years incessantly chattering about the historic catastrophe that they allowed to occur?
With some pressure and help, I think the media can be convinced to do the responsible thing, just this once. Thanks in large part to the work of bloggers, concerned citizens, and other outside voices, the media was finally made to begin calling out McCain's lies on an individual basis. With the same kind of activism, they can be led - by the nose, if necessary - to the deeper significance and meaning of that campaign of lies.