While this is ostensibly a criticism about McCain, I found this point quite salient:

The puzzle is explained partly by the US press, which barely reported the story. The Washington Post broke it in June 1998 but declined to relate the joke on the grounds it was “too vile to repeat”. Such coyness has long been ingrained in the US media, which has an annoying tendency to regard its readers as wayward children in need of moral protection. That’s one important reason, incidentally, that blogs are doing so well in the US - they have no such scruples and behave in ways more akin to the British than the mainstream American media.

While I don’t want the entire U.S. media to turn into the New York Post, it would be nice if they would treat the public as adults capable of understanding complex things.

(via Cogitamus)