Remarkably, no one in the traveling press corps seems to have thought it weird, much less wrong, to assign pool reports to a Beltway player so in sync with the administration’s foreign policy, so beloved by the vice president. “Thanks again to @SCClemons of @The Atlantic for a colorful pool report from the Biden trip,” tweeted CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller. “Colorful” is one word for it. “Useless” and “self-indulgent” are others. The vice president himself, by continually referring to “your pool,” seems to have understood better than the traveling press the conflict of interest presented by Clemons. Or perhaps the press, in giving Clemons the pool assignment, sought to show to the world, in a passive-aggressive way, just how phony and strained the coverage of this White House is. Whatever their reasons, neither Clemons nor anyone else in the press corps traveling with Biden seems to have asked what the vice president’s son Hunter, a former lobbyist with manifold business interests, was up to while accompanying dad on his East Asian tour. Or would asking that question hurt one’s future job prospects?

Adversarial journalism has been replaced by secretarial journalism. Obamacare’s glitches have not slowed the trend. While Robert Pear of the New York Times has been skeptical and critical of the Obamacare rollout, his colleagues on the paper’s political team are eager to return to boosting the program’s namesake. “Democrats’ Latest Campaign for Health Care Law Begins,” read the front-page headline on Thursday’s paper. “Seizing on the good news of an improving health care website and rising enrollments,” write Jonathan Weisman and Michael D. Shear, President Obama and his allies on Wednesday “highlighted parts of the law that are popular with the public and reminded Americans, and the law’s opponents, of what would be lost if the Affordable Care Act were repealed.”

Good news? Improving health care website? Rising enrollments?