ALL THE CAMPAIGN PRESS RELEASES THAT ARE FIT TO PRINT

we bloggers can blog all we want, but most of us do nothing that substitutes for the real work of newsgathering. I say that out of appreciation for what the mainstream press does -- and yet the mainstream press, especially its campaign staff, is often given over to dueling press releases disguised as news, so you wonder why the news outfits even bother to pay campaign reporters (wouldn't it be much easier and cheaper to let the campaigns directly write up the spin and then publish it under some campaign flacks byline?)

So, yesterday, in The New York Times, we had this, ostensibly written by Helene Cooper of the Times:

With a Republican opponent all but chosen and the general election campaign about to start, President Obama is preparing to emphasize an issue that few Democratic candidates have embraced in the past: national security, long the domain of the Republican Party.

At the same time, the Obama campaign is seeking to portray Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, as a national security neophyte....

Today, we get the Romney campaign's response, ostensibly written by Michael Barbaro of the Times:

... in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers....

That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue....

The relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney —-- nurtured over meals in Boston, New York and Jerusalem, strengthened by a network of mutual friends and heightened by their conservative ideologies -- has resulted in an unusually frank exchange of advice and insights on topics like politics, economics and the Middle East....

Only a few weeks ago, on Super Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu delivered a personal briefing by telephone to Mr. Romney about the situation in Iran....

The Obama press release ran in the paper first, though it ran on a Saturday, while Romney's ran on a Sunday. In both cases, though, the campaigns seem to have spoon-fed the stories to the Times.

I value a lot of what's in the mainstream press, but I'm not sure we'd lose anything if the campaigns just wrote up these stories themselves. More to the point, I don't the stories would seem very different.