Last week, after Republicans pivoted to Benghazi in unison, The Huffington Post's Sam Stein observed an interesting phenomenon.

When it came time to put White House press secretary Jay Carney in the hot seat, reporters for smaller outlets—whose correspondents are consigned to the back rows of the briefing room—were interested in real, unfolding dramas: Ukraine, the Affordable Care Act, the Snowden disclosures, and so on.

But when Carney moved to the big-name journalists at the front of the room, the only thing anyone seemed to care about was Benghazi.

If you were listening to a recording of the briefing it would sound something like this:

FWIW, my unofficial rundown of the topics addressed in today's briefing pic.twitter.com/zFVP22F10o — Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 1, 2014

And that raises an interesting question, because in covering the story as a political scandal, just as Republicans want them to, the only scalps the media has really collected are their own. CBS suspended Lara Logan after "60 Minutes" aired, and later had to retract, her Benghazi feature; Sharyl Attkisson resigned from the same network, charging her former colleagues with liberal bias—reportedly because they didn't adequately promote her Benghazi coverage; and ABC's Jonathan Karl had to apologize last year after he passed along an inaccurate summation of then-unreleased White House Benghazi emails. The administration had granted members of Congress access to the emails in classified briefings, and the source who provided Karl the summary (presumably a Republican) had either taken poor notes, or intentionally misconstrued their contents, to make it appear as if the White House had thumbed the scales in the inter-agency dispute over how to address the attacks publicly.