I don't know why it comes as a shock to anyone that the Washington, D.C. press corp pals around with the politicians they are supposed to cover. I think the press has usually kissed up to those in power.
Liberals, for whatever reason, have come to think of journalism as always being the sort of investigative work Woodward and Bernstein did in breaking open the Watergate scandal (the scandal's a bit ironic to me), which I think is more the exception rather than the rule.
The American media has been about reinforcing, rather than challenging the status quo, with a few rare exceptions.
We all now know FDR had polio and could barely walk because of it.
Yet very few Americans realized the man they were voting into office, from re-entering New York state politics in the late 1920's through his Presidency, was effectively a wheelchair bound cripple.
This is one of only two known photographs of FDR in a wheelchair. FDR contracted polio in 1921. Few Americans were ever aware of FDR's disability. This was due in large part to the cooperation of members of the press, who almost always photographed him from the waist up. FDR insisted on this policy when he re-entered politics after his bout with polio, and it was continued during his presidency.
http://www.healthmedialab.com/...
In the late 1930's Congress started investigating Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Our alliance with the USSR put these investigations on hold, but the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) ramped up these investigations in the 1947. Eventually the press corp did push back against McCarthyism, but I think it was as much to do with McCarthy overreaching and going after the military, which decided to leak information to journalists to knock McCarthy down a peg.
Of course the press pushing back against McCarthyism did nothing for those targeted by the HUAC, which happily spent most of the 1950's ruining the careers of many Hollywood writers, producers, actors and directors, without much or any challenge from the press corp.
Until forced to confront the injustice of segregation, by the Civil Rights movement, the media in today's context would've been either "asleep at the wheel" or openly complicit with those perpetuating Jim Crow laws in the South and less formal methods of segregation in the North.
For me, growing up in the post-Watergate era, there's a bit of irony in the deep scar Watergate left on the psyche of grown-ups during my childhood because despite the fact journalists broke the story, without journalists working with those in power Americans would never have had the naive view the government would never be corrupt or abuse power.
Even though we liberals are frustrated with the state of modern American journalism and the social interaction between the media and politicians, I honestly think its more common and traditional than liberals have led themselves to believe because of how Watergate got brought to light, the Pentagon papers and other shocking stories of the 1960's and 1970's, which challenged the establishment.
I don't think there'd have been as much shock, about these things if the media was truly acting as the Fourth Estate in American politics, because people would've already been aware the government can and has abused its power.