If you view access reporters, such as the White House press corps, as intelligence officers trying to convince their sources to divulge what they know–which is often not in said sources’ best interests–then the White House press corps’ response makes sense: they have been compromised by the people whom they were supposed to turn, and are desperately trying to conceal that they are compromised.
Aside: The reason this hasn’t died down yet, I think, is because there is a lot of long-term anger at the political press corps, going back to the Iraq War. Shittyness accumulates, and it’s coming to a head right now on the left-ish side of things (doesn’t help that many of us have gone through multiple cycles of this).
mikethemadbiologist
I would extend that long-term anger back even further to the Clinton impeachment debacle (followed by their dismal coverage of the 2000 coup). If you remember, nobody outside the beltway gave a shit about Clinton getting a blowjob in the oval office. Despite him being a moral monster and crypto-Republican, he was very popular with the general public, and we all recognized that Clinton Derangement Syndrome had taken hold among the Very Serious People. I could never understand why Faux News was being taken seriously by same, and had the opportunity to question Bob Edwards when he was on a speaking (book?) tour in the late 90s about why NPR was letting obviously crazy right-wing nutjobs dictate their news cycle; I left in disgust when he basically answered, “Well, everybody’s doing it,” never to listen to NPR regularly again.