This sort of behavior against interest is not peculiar to our era. Here is Mark Twain, looking back on the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s Tea Partygoers:

“In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable.”

“Remember some of the other battles: Lexington and Concord, Hamburger Hill, Pork Chop Hill?” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). “We’re not going to leave this hill until we kill this bill!”

“Who will kill this bill?” asked Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.). “You will!”

“Let’s kill this bill,” proposed Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio).

“This bill will be killed,” agreed Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

The reason the press is doing better is that it’s not faced with the same extraordinary challenge presented by the Bush administration. This administration, I’m happy to say, is not unprecedentedly and spectacularly dishonest, incompetent and secretive, and therefore doesn’t require the kind of courage to cover that the Bush-era White House press corps, to its shame, failed to summon.
…
Do you think the media should strive for objectivity in its reporting?

Mr Froomkin: No. Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.