This year will likely go down in the history books as the year of the angry voter. But 2010 will also be an election year notable for another kind of ire: when politicians let their contempt for the news media boil over.

From New York to Alaska, the 2010 campaign season has been rife with hostile and downright bizarre encounters between candidates and the news media. Even before press-politician relations seemed to hit a nadir two weeks ago when security guards for Joe Miller, a Republican Senate candidate from Alaska, handcuffed a reporter, Charles B. Rangel, the famously cantankerous Democrat from Harlem, castigated an MSNBC reporter as television cameras rolled.

“It’s a dumb question, and I’m not going to respond,” Mr. Rangel said in July, dismissing a question about his ethics violations case before adding a gleeful “Next!”

Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor in New York, had to be physically separated from a reporter for The New York Post last month as the two engaged in a tense shouting match  again, as cameras rolled  about the newspaper’s coverage of Mr. Paladino’s daughter, whom he fathered from an extramarital affair.