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And yet, my view is that Herman Cain and his conservative defenders couldn’t be more wrong about the duty of the press corps.

Cain wants to be president of the United States. He’s never held elective office before, has displayed only cursory knowledge of domestic politics and international affairs, has passed others’ words off as his own, and has made several dubious statements about sensitive public issues. These have ranged from suggesting a fence between Mexico and the United States be electrified to asserting that he wouldn’t put a Muslim in his Cabinet. When these statements received critical news coverage, Cain responded: He claimed he was joking about wanting to electrocute illegal immigrants, and issued an abject apology to Muslims.

That’s how self-government works. These candidates say what they’d do as president (“9-9-9”), and we examine their ideas. That’s as it must be. The presidency of the United States is a temporary job but the person who holds it possesses more power than any single person on this planet. So Americans want to know the character and temperament of the individual they are putting into office.

Is the candidate sufficiently worldly? Is he (or she) tough enough, smart enough, empathetic enough? Do their policies make any sense? Will they keep us out of war? Will they help the poor? Do they know anything about the economy? Can we envision their family in the White House? Is the candidate a bully?

These are the questions voters turn over in their minds. Any reporter who doesn’t think sexual harassment is a legitimate area of inquiry ought to turn in his press pass to a younger, hungrier reporter and become a food critic or travel writer. Examining how Herman Cain treated the women at the restaurant association is exactly the role of the press.

Most conservatives know this, but they have issues with the media. I had an exchange of emails about Cain with a movement conservative from my home state of California. His name is Mark Meckler, and he’s co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. He’s uncompromisingly conservative, but a principled guy; and I wondered what he thought about a candidate accused of serial groping.

Mark didn’t speak directly to the Cain allegations. Instead, he compared the feeding frenzy on the Cain story to the almost defiant refusal of the mainstream media to report on the John Edwards sex scandal until after Edwards was no longer a 2008 Democratic candidate. Mark called it an “obvious double standard,” concluding his message with this thought: “The history of journalism of this era will be one of blatant bias and an amazing lack of responsibility and professionalism.”

Those words ought to bother my journalistic brethren more than they do: The double standard is not imaginary, and has helped sustain the career of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators who this week were noisily defending Herman Cain and attacking his accusers and the mainstream media.

But blind partisanship is a distorting instinct, whichever side is doing it, and leads its practitioners to some strange rhetorical places. “Sexual harassment is a political tool of the left to get rid of people, or to score money gains, whatever is most desired,” Rush said last week.

Limbaugh knows better, but it’s the kind of thing that pops out of one’s mouth when partisan points are the goal instead of non-partisan elucidation. Was the press too hard on Sarah Palin and too easy on Joe Biden? Absolutely. Did it take a powder on John Edwards? Yes, but I would suggest that the fate of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a very liberal Democrat, is a more recent and relevant example.

I don’t remember conservative commentators agonizing over the nuances of journalistic ethics in the Weiner case. Acting on a tip (which came in the form of a “retweet” on the social networking site Twitter) of a lewd picture posted via Rep. Weiner’s Twitter account, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart republished a screenshot of the picture (which had since been deleted) in a post raising questions about the Congressman’s claim that his Facebook account had been hacked.* When it soon became clear that Weiner was misbehaving, and lying about it, the mainstream media basically hectored this guy into telling the truth, which he ultimately did — at the cost of his career in Congress. 

We don’t have photographic evidence documenting any wrongdoing on the part of Herman Cain, and aren’t likely to find it. We do have the testimonials of an increasing number of women, however. It’s the media’s job to examine these stories carefully, and also to search for other possible victims and witnesses. I’m not nominating Politico for a Pulitzer Prize just yet, but I will suggest that Joseph Pulitzer himself would have approved of the publication’s exposé on Cain.

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy,” Pulitzer once told his assistant Alleyne Ireland. “Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.”

That’s our job. 

(*This story was updated to clarify the circumstances surrounding the Weiner case.)