They live in a closed community of self-absorbed individuals who all attend the same smart cocktail parties.
They cannot be blamed for self-congratulating and for feeling that their every word must be treated with the same respect usually reserved for the Ten Commandments.
I think one of the duties of the Press Secretary should be to point out the stupidity of some members of the press and impose sanction based on the premise that only serious reporers/reportage will be allowed access to the White House. Some will scream censorship, but that is unimportant, so long as the process is fair and impartial, and based upon an individual's displayed characteristics instead of political/philospohic points.
By weeding out the stupid we can be reasonably assured that we would get something approximating the truth, albeit filtered through individuals of varying political proclivities. You may ban Reporter X from the New York Times for being outrageously biased or stupid, but the Times would be free to replace Reporter X with Reporter Y.
Hard to work and possibly impractical, but a very interesting premise, I think.
The Press Secretary isn't the forum moderator or otherwise have 'banning' capabilities when someone acts badly or even offensively worse than that, as many among the press corps do and have for a while.
You can't regulate who among the press corps socializes with whom else (all of D.C. is keyed into the social schemes there, and dependent upon them for a great deal of information and resource).
The most adept with the press corps is stepping aside from their nuttiness, in my view. Don't presume or assume that every other American "out there" is watching these meets and not concluding as you do about the press corps, because many do. I do, others do.
It's not as if the press corps isn't clearly biased to nearly everyone else, is my point, because they are: clearly biased and clearly prejudiced and often irrationally focused on the ant on the shoe while the leather factory is in jeaopardy.
In my view, they waste a lot of time and resources being so bombastic on behalf of liberalism but for what it is worth, their behavior speaks more about them than it does any Republican Press Secretary.
The mainstream media, by this point, is pretty well lost to credibility in many of our perceptions. They might as well have Paris Hilton there yelling about Chiahuahas as they now have Helen Thomas mumbling about rights and such.